Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

How to Turn Your Blog into a Profitable Business: The 3-Step Process with Graham Robertson

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 333

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Are you ready to unlock the secrets of turning a passion project into a thriving business? Imagine being at a crossroads in your career, unsure of the next step, and a friend suggests starting a blog. That's how Graham Robertson, founder and CEO of Beloved Brands, began his entrepreneurial journey. Listen in as Graham unfolds his transformative transition from a corporate marketer to an independent brand strategist, leveraging the power of his blog to reach out to an audience that spans across 30 countries.

Graham's voyage of self-discovery began with a blog on WordPress, where he wrote extensively about his passion - marketing. As the blog gained traction, he figured out the importance of strategic writing, niche selection and reader feedback in shaping his content. Delve deeper into the art of identifying your areas of expertise and utilizing guest bloggers to fill your knowledge gaps, as Graham navigates his way through an intricate world of blogging that ultimately led him to a whopping 50,000 monthly visitors.

Graham didn't stop at just blogging; he used his platform to build a business empire. From leveraging SEO and keyword research to boost website traffic, to creating brand funnels, writing and publishing a book, designing templates, and launching an online course, he has done it all. In our conclusive discussion, he sheds light on his process of creating and selling digital products. Get an insider's view of his journey from translating his work from a Mac to PowerPoint, selling templates through WooCommerce, to developing an online course that mirrors his in-person training experience using Thinkific. Buckle up for a roller-coaster ride into Graham Robertson’s world of turning blogs into businesses!

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Speaker 1:

We all know that blogging is critical for our success in digital first marketing, when it comes to SEO, when it comes to content marketing, when it comes to sharing our perspectives, having content to share on social attracting clients, etc. Etc. But is it possible to build a business from a blog? Well, the answer is yes, because today's guest has done exactly that. So listen in for all the advice that you're going to glean on this next episode of the your digital marketing coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach helping you grow your business with digital. First marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 333. The lucky threes of this podcast of mine, every one of my special guests I hand select, and sometimes there's a story not only that they have that's going to help reveal more information and more advice, but also how I met them, and today's guest is going to be a very, very interesting story that also gives you a little hint about the potential out there in social media for relationship building and for networking. So a lot of you know that I have been very active and been very passionate about Twitter as a social network. Now you're wondering today's interview is going to be all about from business to blog, and we're going to get there. But there's a backstory because on Twitter, as you know, with Elon Musk takeover, things have changed quite a bit. But I'm trying to get the most value out of that social network as I can get, even though I lost that coveted blue check mark a little while ago. So and I haven't paid to play yet We'll see what happens.

Speaker 1:

So, as part of my efforts, I put out a tweet that sort of went viral for my standards, which is hey, let's make sure, no matter what happens on Twitter, we get connected on LinkedIn. Now, you never know when you throw something out there like that, when you create an event and say, hey, if you're in the area, stop by. If you're connected with someone on LinkedIn or following someone on Twitter and you take the conversation to a deeper level, you never know what happens. So there's one gentleman that actually took me up on this offer and we got connected on LinkedIn and he sort of like Neil, you know, your blog's got a lot of traffic recently. I'm like, oh, why do you say that? And it started a conversation. But where the conversation went was that there was this gentleman that we had sort of followed each other on Twitter without getting to know each other.

Speaker 1:

That had a really great story to share and it's a great story that I want to learn from. But I want you to learn from as well as to how you can legitimately build a business from a blog, because this gentleman has done exactly that. So I want to welcome to the stage Graham Robertson, founder and CEO of Beloved Brands. How to build a business from a blog. Graham, welcome to the your digital marketing coach. Podcast Bean Livestream.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it and I'm looking forward to sharing my story. It's a very interesting use of technology that you know I'm. I'm in the over 50 crowd, so it's interesting that you know everybody thinks all this stuff is for young people, but I think I'm proving that you can do it at any age.

Speaker 1:

Amen, brother. So, graham, I noticed you know we never know where people are in the world when we get connected. So I noticed that we are fellow North Americans. But you know, south of the border, you're north of the border. Whereabouts in Canada, are you? I'm trying to place the accent, but I can't.

Speaker 3:

I'm about an hour north of Toronto and I have to watch how I say Toronto, because we locals call it Toronto and then people don't know where it is and a lot of Americans think I have sort of a half Irish accent and I probably have a distinctive Canadian accent.

Speaker 1:

Nice, OK, it's all good. We're all global citizens here, so so, graham, why don't we start before we get into, like the blog, the business? So you started your own brand, your own company, where you've had a great success helping you know various brands with, with brandy marketing. How did this all get started?

Speaker 3:

So I spent 20 years in the corporate world so in the traditional companies like Johnson and Johnson and General Mills and Coke and then I hit that point in my mid 40s where I'm like what do I do next? And that's where I started my own business. But at the same time, I started a blog. And I started a blog on a whim because I wasn't quite sure how to. To be very honest, I wasn't sure how to balance my new schedule, which was quite different than a corporate schedule of nine to five.

Speaker 3:

This one had a lot of free time and a lot of busy time. And a friend told me to start a blog and I was like, what's that? This is 2010 and that's when I started it. And so it. It just grew and grew and grew, and I didn't you know one of the things I'll talk about in our session but I didn't grow it in the way that probably I should have. I just grew it randomly, and so that was, you know, using LinkedIn as well to sort of feed the blog, and that's sort of the combination that I looked at. So I just started writing randomly.

Speaker 1:

Graham, you love corporate. I mean, it sounds like you work with some iconic brands, so I you know. Was there a reason that you love corporate? Was it, you know, family situation? You just got sick of it? Or you got entrepreneurial bugger?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, in corporate marketing sometimes there is some age discrimination that happens when you get over 40. You know, I sort of met that as well and that sort of became my. I've got friends in the same age bracket. But I looked at it and I thought what do I do that could last me the next 15 to 20 years? I don't want to be, you know, keep struggling where I feel like I'm hanging on. I want to be thriving. And so it kind of like that led me into the world of the consulting and training space. You know, and said you know, I've got all my corporate experience I have, so let's use that to my advantage. And I looked at this as a second career.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and you know, I know this is not a a corporate or career branding. You know interview. But I will say, at a certain age you realize that the corporate world there was no guarantee to begin with that there would always be a job for you, right. And the older you get, the more you realize that you have to really fight for a job and the number of jobs just get less and less over time. So I definitely know the feeling. I know a lot of people have gone through that as well.

Speaker 3:

You feel like you're not in a powerful position when you're in the corporate world and you're a little older, and when you start your own business. If you do it right, that's where I find you can now regain your power and feel confident, and that's why I would encourage a lot of people to try it, see how it goes and give it a shot, because I've I've loved it. I love my first career and I'm loving my second career equally, even though they're a little bit different.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I know that's awesome, really great advice. And you know, graham, I'm sure you agree what we're going to talk about today. You're not. You're never too old for any of this, and I say this when I do like LinkedIn trainings to people in their 50s or even 60s, and I find that older generations, actually, because they have that business acumen, they understand networking, they actually pick it up a lot faster and actually, you know, excel on it. But now we have this friend who says hey, you should start a blog. This is like my wife said hey, neil, you should write an ebook, and then I became an author. So I'm just curious I'm assuming this friend was in marketing and did they have their own blog, or what was their sort of rationale behind 2010 starting a blog?

Speaker 3:

So they were a peer of mine and they said this was, I remember, distinctively. They said I get about a hundred readers a week and most of them are my clients who read it. And I thought, okay, 100 readers a week, that sounds great, you know, and that was the starting point. I think I got 100 readers in my first week and by my two or three months in it was up to 1,000 readers a week and then 3,000 readers a week and now it's. You know, we're into the about, you know, 50,000 a month range of views on my blog. So it's kind of kept snowballing as it goes and you know, I've managed to, probably at a midpoint, and I think that's where, you know, you can add in and learn the technical sides of blogging as well, and that way it helped to fuel it a little bit more.

Speaker 1:

All right before we jump forward there. So there might be businesses out there that already. I assume when you started your blog, you already had a website and was the website. Oh, you didn't. Okay, so you launched your website, which was going to be consulting and training services, with a blog in mind. Is that the idea? Or you didn't even have a business yet? You were just going to launch the blog?

Speaker 3:

I started them at the same time, but I don't know, even you know I'd have to go back. I think I did the blog for a year before I even said you know what. I should start a homepage now and add that to the business. So that's what I mean. That's hilarious, yeah, if we go back to 2010,. That's sort of the range that I was looking at I was like, okay, I guess I should maybe put my services online as well. So it was kind of a bit random in that space and I think that's where I could have learned. But I did learn by doing, rather than, you know, learning the other sides of the business as well.

Speaker 1:

So, for the first year you were basically generating business offline while blogging online, and then you like distinctly different things at the beginning, yes, okay.

Speaker 3:

And if I were to start my business 10 years prior, all of my business probably would have been local. You know, I would have gone to the 30 companies around me and gone local. Of course, and because of the blog at the time I started, people don't care where you are anymore. I mean, you're in California, I'm in Canada, but we could be in Ireland and you know Bulgaria for all we know on the internet, and that's what's beautiful about it and it's allowed me to actually open up to many people around the world, and I've done business in about 30 or 40 different countries at this point Fantastic.

Speaker 1:

So when you started your blog, did you like go to blogger? I mean, what was like from a technology perspective? What did you do, like you know, how did you start it?

Speaker 3:

I started it with WordPress, okay.

Speaker 1:

WordPresscom ororg the free one.

Speaker 3:

Okay, that's how I started too, yeah, and I think I spent 13 bucks on my website name and you know, to start typing, which I, you know, was never a natural writer over the years. So it, you know, reminded me of, you know, writing an 11th grade essay, whereas kind of like, oh man, how do I structure this thing? And but I just started writing on things I loved and that's what you know. Marketing is my passion area, so that's what I wrote about Now.

Speaker 1:

We want people to take notes, but not yet because and my story is the same way, in fact I launched my blog, wordpresscom, through LinkedIn when they used to have these external apps, so I press the WordPresscom app on LinkedIn, but anyway, at the beginning, nobody blogs with intent, nobody blogs with strategy. So and I know we're going to get to that in all your advice but I'm just curious you mentioned that you began blogging about things you were passionate about in marketing, I'm assuming based on your experience and expertise and insights, and that just naturally drew the audience. Were you at that point on a weekly basis blogging? And then every week, you had a day and a time, and you always had the inspiration where there are many days where it's like, oh, what am I going to blog about today? Maybe I'll, I'll rest for a week, or what was that process like that first year?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, my first blog, which I was striving to. What do I write about? I think I wrote about a five guys hamburgers, you know, Excellent hamburgers, by the way.

Speaker 3:

Cleather passion area for me when you combine that with marketing and so I just started writing about what was great about it, what was bad about it, you know, and just wrote it and that I sort of, you know, took another week, wrote another one and probably wrote five in the first three months and then they started to take off. And that's where I started to become a once a week writer and was writing on Sunday morning when I had some free time, and then releasing it on the Monday kind of thing. And that's what probably is my usual schedule to find some free time during the week when it's quiet and when I can structure my thinking. And that's what. That's sort of how I got into it During that first year.

Speaker 1:

Was there ever any feedback that you got from your readers comments that you sort of tweaked what you were gonna blog about based on that feedback? Or was it purely just I'm inspired by this, I'm gonna blog about this.

Speaker 3:

Yep, probably was about the one year mark where I started to actually think about what I'm gonna write about and so what. I also connected with LinkedIn as a place to drop the blog and so at that point in time, as we remember, back to LinkedIn, there were the LinkedIn groups, probably in around that 2011, 2014 period, where I'd utilize the groups to sort of trigger conversation. That's where I started to hear more feedback on I like the blog and you know, can you have you wrote about this or that, and that's where maybe I started to think about maybe I should structure my thinking a little bit more and maybe I should write about topics that people want to hear about.

Speaker 1:

And, by the way, if you're listening, linkedin groups today are nothing like they were a year ago. They drew genuine conversation and really, if you did it well, a lot of great website traffic as well. So just not the same today. Just, I often see really outdated advice out there, so I just wanna make sure we make that very clear, I think.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I have a LinkedIn group still that I get about six visitors a year on now, but it's literally literally back in the day. You would probably get about 500 views just from a LinkedIn group drop and that was probably, as I mentioned, probably died around 2014,. But there wasn't the feed at that point either. So there was no LinkedIn feed and I think the two have sort of replaced each other.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, totally agree. So you're a year in, you're starting to drop these on LinkedIn and you're getting feedback and at this point it's like you know what? I have a blog, I'm getting feedback readers. Why don't I take this offline business activity and put it online? I'm assuming at some point there was a trigger. And then you realize, because you have a WordPresscom website, you can just add a services page, a homepage, and that's pretty much what you did, right I'm sure, to how it happened.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's probably about a year in where I said, okay, maybe start a homepage, start other services page.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So now we're at a point you're year in you're starting to get that traffic from 100 views a week to a few hundred a month, a few thousand a month. We're year in and I wanna get to the advice that we talked about this beforehand. But since then you've seen great success, and one of the things that you said is the cause of your success is that and we talk about niches a lot in marketing in general and in the creator economy, for those content creators that are listening or watching but really building your blog around your focused niche and I'm curious because in corporate marketing that's pretty broad I sort of struggle with myself. I got, like you know, content digital slash, content slash, influencer slash, social media marketing, when those are for distinct niches. So I'm curious as to what you found your niche in and maybe our listeners can be inspired by that story.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I grew up through traditional brand management in the corporate world at Johnson and Johnson type companies, cpg, and so my niche was, you know, knowing a little bit about everything, but really what I started to look at was I know about planning, I know about positioning, I know about marketing and execution, I know about analytics, and those probably became, you know, and probably the four different, four different, five kind of streams that I started to write more about. Or even if I wrote about topics, I would try to bring those thoughts into the actual topic. So if I wrote about hamburgers, I would talk about, you know, how they're positioning themselves and how they're executing. So that does have a bit of more structure to the writing.

Speaker 1:

Got it, so it was a little bit broader of a niche. But you had well, today we call these topic clusters, I call them sort of like blog categories, but you had four distinct areas in which you were blogging.

Speaker 3:

All that were related to this little bit broader niche, yes, and it gives me a comfort zone because I know the topics and I can also defend the topics and I can engage with the audience in knowing that. You know. And what I found once I found that expertise area is I started to realize that maybe I wasn't an expert in things that were outside of that and that's where I can allow others to engage in that, and that's actually how I've structured my business as well. I focused on mainly planning, positioning and training for marketers, and so that's what really gave me that structure. I realized now that I'm an expert in something. I realized how little I know about baseball and football and basketball that I thought I knew.

Speaker 1:

Of course. Of course we can't be experts in everything, and I think that's really interesting and it's really a great advice that pick your lane and just stick to it and if you find that you're out of your lane, you know, find someone else that can help fill that gap. I don't know if you've invited guest bloggers. It's something that I've done. Like when Google Plus came into the scene, we had a guy named Mark, or I had a contributor named Mark Trapegan, who was seriously this SEO expert, who was also considered a guru in the Google Plus world, was contributing to my blog, helping him and obviously helping my blog as well. I'm curious you know bringing in other people with other expertise for your business, for training, I get. Have you done that on your blog as well, or is it 100% written by you?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's 100% written by me at this point, but would you know, be welcome to engage with the right people as well. That might be the next step for me in the blogging world.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they gotta be the right people, for sure. So, and it's really funny, you know, we're all sort of experimenting with all these AI tools, and maybe that'll be a topic at the end. And there's one for Twitter, and as I compose a tweet, it'll tell me like how viral things the tweet will go. So, obviously, my tweets are all about marketing. And then I remembered, like, in you know, high school English class, my teacher would say you know, Schaefer, vigorous writing is concise, like keep it short, keep it simple, and so, when I wrote that in a tweet, it said this is out of, this is irrelevant to your audience, or this is out of yeah, and it's like and you're right, you know that's and I think it's really great, whether it's blogging or it's social media with a business is that you have a defined audience, you have a defined mission, and you have defined highways of content, and the more you stick to them, the more you begin to be seen as an expert in them.

Speaker 1:

You gain authority, right, and so I wanna get to the next point, though, because, going from you know a hundred a week to 50,000 visitors a month, the next bit of advice that you had was to get to know how SEO works, so I'm curious.

Speaker 1:

It took me really until COVID Same here, 12 years into my blogging journey to figure this out, and that's one of the reasons why I've started to get a lot of traffic, as you referred to. But I'm curious at what point you were blogging, at what point did you figure like man, I gotta figure SEO out. And then how did you figure it out? So it probably was.

Speaker 3:

So first of all, if we come back to that curve, the LinkedIn groups really helped to take things off dramatically. And then the next curve was probably LinkedIn feed was, for me, also a great way to take off to another stage. And when COVID hit, probably a lot of us started to get reflective of how our business was going, which I'll also talk about. You know, added services a little bit later as well. I looked at it and I said, okay, so my numbers are kind of flat for the last couple of years, you know, probably in the 20,000 range a month. And so I said, oh, that's pretty good. And then I thought, you know, maybe it's not great.

Speaker 3:

And I started to get into more of the technical side of SEO. And so there's sort of two sides of it how you write and how it shows up to you know, the SEO crawlers, so to speak, and really to the readers. And so those are the structures with titles and sentence structure and how big your paragraphs are and all those things. There's some technical sides of that and there's quite a few. There are some online tools within the blogging space. I use Yoast that can help guide your writing and tell you when your sentences are too long, or you started a sentence with three words in a row, you know same word in a row, et cetera, and that's how you write. And then you can also look at how you know other tools of how you show up in the search.

Speaker 3:

And what was funny was if you go to Brand Plan, if you Google Brand Plan and a friend of mine told me this was sort of an awakening as well around that time we were in a coffee shop right before COVID hit and he said you know, if I Google Brand Plan, you're like six of the seven top searches. I'm like, okay, how'd that happen? You know, and that happened probably because I wrote that story 12 years ago and structured it, luckily, in a way that worked. But if I wanna look at some of the other topics, I probably had to do a bit more work around those to figure out how to make sure I showed up. And you know there's some things with link building and a few other things that you can do that can really help drive your business. So you've really gotta understand how you write and how you show up on Google are two probably very important things, and there's a bit of technical side of that. I'm not the expert in that, but I learned it in a way that can work for me.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I think that's where I came to my realization as well. At the beginning you get this increase in traffic right, but over time what happens is, as you outrank other competitors, they come back in and begin to outrank you. Your content gets old. Yes, they call that content decay. So you get to a point and the exact same where it's like it's just. Why have I plateaued Like I'm publishing new content every week and I'm assuming you got to the same point Now when you started using those SEO tools? I'm curious at some point did you move from WordPresscom to WordPressorg to be able to make use of these plugins and other technology?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I moved there, probably around 2012. Oh, we're early on and so early on, and that was because I think there's a recommended limit of how many people can view your blog or there's some other aspects of it that make it reasonable to shift towards that, and so that's where I moved on in that space. It's probably even more complicated to write within the paid version, but it offers a lot more tools as well, and I use other tools like Elementor and a few other things that help me to write and structure things, and if I, the odd time, I'll see artwork or stuff that I had done in a story from 12 years ago and I think, oh my God, it looks so bad, but now I think it looks pretty good.

Speaker 1:

So, getting back to this topic again, get to know how SEO works. I think that it's like an onion, right, you peel one layer and there's just endless layers on this onion that we call SEO. So and I was the same we start with Yoast, but at some point Did you start looking at something that we refer to in SEO as keyword research? You start looking at well, maybe it's not just about what I'm, maybe it's not just like how I structure the content and Yoast and all those things, but maybe there are other things that I should be targeting that can uncover a lot more volume. So when did yeah, how did that process go?

Speaker 3:

A great example of that is I call the funnel a brand funnel, and that's probably because of my background and a sale, calling it a sales funnel or a marketing funnel gets about 10 times the volume that a brand funnel would generate. And that's just an example. Because you call it something. What's the market want or call it or searching for? And those are things that you can really get into and it's, you know, peeling back the onion. The more you know about it, the less you really find out. You knew you know there's all these H1, h2, the headlines and stuff like that. It's kind of like, oh, what is that H4?

Speaker 1:

But you don't need to know any of that to get 50,000 hits a month, which is obviously the topic right now. I want to take one more step forward because this other thing you wanted to cover. So you built a blog around a niche, you got to know how SEO works, so you're slowly climbing this SEO ladder and getting this website traffic, but your business was always sort of offline. So I'm assuming at some point it's like I'm getting this traffic and I am the exact same way. How do I make this traffic work for my business? And I'm assuming this is where we get into this final topic. I'm curious as to how you realize that. And then, how did you actually go about building this pathway?

Speaker 3:

Well, for me. I sell consulting and training and those are some pretty big price tags, so I don't need a lot of clients to have a great year on that side of the business, but with 50,000 views a month, you kind of like well, what about these other 49,000 people that aren't gonna engage in that way? And that's where I started to. I wrote three books over the last few years that cover the different topics my beloved brand's book. I wrote, a healthcare version and a B2B version Congratulations. I also offer all my templates, so all the tools that people see online. You can actually now get those in PowerPoint versions of it to use on your own business. And then I've also created an online version with a mini MBA to take my training that I do in person for large companies and it's more guided to the individuals at a price tag that is much more focused for an individual basis.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha. So when you talk about building a pathway and I actually struggle with the same thing because you are primarily B2B you get 50,000 hits. If 10 of those convert in a year, you're gonna do really, really well, probably with your partner. So how do you serve the other people? Well, you need to create products to serve them and these products some of them might be free to build loyalty. But then you created templates online course. That's just a wonderful example in the creator economy of what is possible.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, the book is $40 and the templates range from $79 to $200. But it's not at an entry point. For a company, hiring to train me is probably more like 20,000. Of course, and that's where, to your point, with 50,000 viewers, I only need probably even five of those a month to even be interested and maybe convert half of those to have a great year. And then what do I do with the other 49,000? Just to make sure that I'm making use of that as well as providing people some entry points when they're engaging in the content as well. They might not wanna ever spend $20,000, and that's fine too, but if they want to use some of the tools, you know $100 or $200 is not that much of an investment, and they can take all the stuff I use as a consultant for my own clients and bring it into their own shop and use it to impress their boss.

Speaker 1:

Well, this is a great example. So I wanna take a step back, which is why I put that screen back up there. Obviously, we're talking about how to build a business from blog. So you were building your this offline marketing training business as you blog.

Speaker 1:

The blog obviously helped build that, but you've truly built a new I would call this a B2B creator economy business, which is you've launched three products, you've launched books, you've launched templates and you've launched a course and, if you don't mind, for those that are listening or watching, they may wonder well, what is the process about writing and publishing a month and creating a book? What is the process about the template? And we hear a lot of people that are really successful selling like notion templates, for instance maybe a lot about that and then what is the process for the course? So I'd like, if you don't mind, I'll just spend a few minutes on each of these just to better understand, like, how you went about it, cause it seems like you have a knack of just breaking through and being successful at all this stuff that I think our listeners are gonna get a lot out of. So let's start with the book.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, my beautiful book which is just over my shoulder there. So it is a I'm gonna say it's a rather herculean process that probably involves writing it about three to five times and probably having a sports fan kind of temper tantrum a few times that you're kind of wondering what the heck's. How hard is this to do? And, to be honest, even my first instinct was why don't I take the 50 best stories I have and put them in a book? And so that was the first round of disaster where I kept using some of the same lessons would show up like 17 times, the same jokes would show up three times and the same stories would show up nine times. You know and I'm so that was sort of the first round of, as I would say, the first disaster that took me about a year before I said this is lousy.

Speaker 3:

And then my next instinct was I love Malcolm Gladwell, so I'm gonna write like Malcolm Gladwell. Well, that was about an hour of. This is really hard. I'm gonna not write like Malcolm Gladwell. And I just again took my own lessons and I came up with this sort of flywheel of my own of how I saw marketing and that's how I structured it. So I looked at, structured it that could make sense for the book, and then wrote to the structure and so that's where it was my aha, and while it took me probably about two or three years to write the book, once.

Speaker 3:

I had the structure, it probably took me like eight weeks to write the book and cause I just was like go, I get it. It was like a light bulb went off for me and I could write that. So it's not an easy process. It's rather Herculean and you've done it yourself and you probably understand that kind of thought. A lot of people think that it. I've had friends that have started a book and never got it halfway through and I can understand that. I've read that famous authors have written their books like 17 times and I can go yeah, mine's just a marketing book, but I can kind of get what they're saying, cause it's a rather interesting process to go through.

Speaker 1:

Now, at that point, because the book is really to serve the 49,999 people visiting your blog every month, I'm assuming that for you, like hooking up with a publisher, wasn't the idea, it was just having a product to sell, so I'm assuming it was self-published. I'm curious, like working with an editor, like graphic design, inner layout how did you find all these people? Or did you learn it yourself?

Speaker 3:

Well, I learned the graphics myself, but I did get an editor because I do suffer from some dyslexia. So there was an editor who went through it for me, and Lisa Geller was very helpful for me and she probably dealt with the torture of my dyslexia, because it came back the first round with about 5,000 little edits here and there. God bless.

Speaker 1:

Lisa, yeah, exactly Awesome the inner layout, that design. That was pretty easy to learn, you know, it was myself.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

I worked on all that. You didn't need to like buy Adobe InDesign or you just did it. On Microsoft Word, I pick it.

Speaker 3:

Again, I do look at Adobe InDesign. That was the other torturous process. I've learned everything myself. That's not a bragging thing, but it's kind of what I like to do. But InDesign is not an easy tool to work with as well, and so you know, all of these things, all of the graphic arts, I've tried to do myself, and that's part of the fun, I guess, as being a solopreneur for me.

Speaker 1:

You know we're pressing a little bit of HTML and JavaScript and CSS. I don't mind, but InDesign man, I you know my brain is not wired for that.

Speaker 3:

InDesign. My son got me onto that and I was like probably took me about 30 days before I even got a little comfortable and probably another year before I got more comfortable. But I you know all these tools I try to learn them myself and you know it's kind of that's half the fun, I think, of this stage of my career Cool so that's the book.

Speaker 1:

You get them printed, you can put them on Amazon and then you can take orders on your side. And I'm assuming the rest is history yes, for the book, and then you write your second. Third, let's talk about the template. So this is a relatively new type of product, but what got you thinking that you know, I could create something called a template and I can actually sell this template?

Speaker 3:

Well, I got asked all the time do you have them available? And so me. All of my artwork is actually done on my Mac, and so all of the templates for the book and all the blog are done on a Mac, which is not as really relevant for people. But during COVID I actually took some time to translate them into the PowerPoint space and that's where it was sort of a request from a lot of different readers along the way to do these, and I developed them into PowerPoint and we've got you know probably different templates for different business models and we've got you know positioning, planning and analytics, whether it's you're a B2B or a consumer or a retailer and a healthcare brand. I've got all of those online and what we do is we sell them through WooCommerce online and it's a virtual download for the customer, and so that's a great tool because it ranges again, they range from $50 up to $200. So, again, a price point, that's more entry level for a given audience.

Speaker 1:

So you're literally taking, you know, because you do these trainings, which I assume you do some of them in PowerPoint and you've created these graphics for it. So basically, you're taking, you know, slides, potentially from training and you're just selling a PowerPoint with these slides. Obviously, you're refining them so that they fulfill that brand promise and that's basically it, correct?

Speaker 3:

Yes, it's that simple, but it's the idealized PowerPoint version of a brand plan. So I mean, I was a VP marketing, you know, in the CPG space, so this is a great way to have a best in class, expertly designed brand plan or whichever tool people are interested in, and so that way it also gives people an entry level price point that they can engage in, something that makes sense for them?

Speaker 1:

Did you have to do any fancy graphics for the PowerPoint? Is this someone? I'm just curious, like you know anyone that is watching or listening and they are presenting their own you know content to the world through PowerPoint, or they're doing trainings and they have PowerPoints. Is it as simple as just compiling that into something that is concise that they can sell, or is there additional things you would recommend they do on top of that to package it to sell?

Speaker 3:

Well, I've kept my version very simple, because then people can add their own artwork or other stuff to it. But this is more of the structure of how a strategy presentation should flow, for the audience Got it.

Speaker 1:

That makes a lot of sense. It's like I said, I've heard about templates normally in the technology space, like the notion, the Excel, not in the idea space, so that's very, very interesting. So then we get to the third one, the Holy Grail, the online course that I think everyone and everyone either has or has tried to do. I'm currently, you know, trying to develop my first, as we speak been a little bit late to the game, but I'm curious as to were you then able to take your trainings and just rationalize what it would look like in a course yes, some gaps, you know invest in an LMS and once again, do it on your own and just get it out to the world. Is that pretty much how it worked?

Speaker 3:

Yes, it is, and that is again. I came up with that during the COVID world, and so what I was looking to do is to replicate the online or sort of the in-person version in an online experience, and what that fulfills is an audience, most times, who can't, or their company isn't doing the training or whatnot investing in that, but they want to look at it for their own career development, and I find that's where it's really helpful and it's at a price point where it makes sense for those people who want to move ahead in their career to get that background and add that, and it's the you know, similar training that I offer in an online version.

Speaker 1:

So that was done. May I ask I'm assuming it was, let me guess, thinkific yes, Okay, that's the platform I'm looking for and listening, that seems to be the platform of choice these days. I think people was in the early days and that whole doing it yourself. You know, there are people who have courses like here's how to sell a course, here's how to create a course. None of that. I assume you found it because you're already doing the trainings. You're already a teacher, I'm assuming. You found the process very intuitive then, right? So yes, they did. If people want to create a course, don't let them just sign up, you know, and start to do it.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and now I want to actually talk about. You've got to structure the order of what you're selling things and probably for me, I still want to sell my you know, my training and my consulting in person first and probably, you know, the books and the templates are probably next level and to me, the online training is probably fifth for me.

Speaker 1:

Wow, even though I'm assuming. The price point of the online training is much higher than the book. Yes, yet it's lower on the totem pole because you think that the people who buy the course are not going to potentially convert into hiring you to be a trainer. Is that the idea that's right.

Speaker 3:

The book is the. To me, the book is the opening point to potentially be in.

Speaker 1:

a client Got it. It makes a lot of sense. So when you have these many things to promote, how do you do you have like one lead magnet per product? Do you have just one? You mentioned brand funnel that you lead people through. How do you? You know, as it gets a little bit more complex that customer journey, they don't know what to do. There's so much out there, how do you handle that?

Speaker 3:

What I've tried to do is to start to layer it in within the stories, the blog stories themselves, and so you can kind of, you know, add an additional content. If you like this brand plan, you can get this template you know it within the brand plan story and then maybe a little, you know, halfway down the page you can talk about. If you want to learn how to do you know writing brand plans, you can take the online course. All of this stuff is in the book. You know that's the kind of mentality I look at, so it's probably embedded. You know, your classic case of content marketing, except I'm doing the content in order to generate my own business.

Speaker 1:

And I think this brings new meaning to build a pathway to your services you offer, not just from blog to other services, but within each blog post. How can we lead them to the appropriate? How can we intertwine the story right?

Speaker 3:

And I do think this question about what is the order of selling or what is the emphasis of selling is something that we probably all wrestle with on a day to day basis. Like if I go three days without selling a book, I get like what's going on? You know I swear. I go back to the order of everything and I'm like is it out of order? And then I just leave it and you know I'll sell $200 worth of books the next day. So you've kind of got to watch out, you know, to reactionary versus just letting it slow.

Speaker 1:

Now so, as we get to you know the end of this interview and you've offered such great advice. Thank you for sharing your story. I'm curious, now that you've built the business from your blog, when do you go now with your blog? It's a great question.

Speaker 3:

I don't know where I go next. You know as I. You know whether I keep working this to grow it, because maybe what I could do in the end is sell this and that becomes my retirement package is to actually, you know, if right now I'm generating 50,000 views a day and most of them are marketers, there's probably another agency that wants to buy this in five to 10 years, that maybe it's gonna be at 100,000 a month or whichever it becomes, and then it has a dollar value or some kind of value to that company, because you know that there's gonna be, you know, 500 a day.

Speaker 1:

gonna be looking up how to write a brand plan yeah, and we've seen we've seen bigger companies start to buy or invest in podcasts, email newsletters and you know, back in Lincoln, brian Dean, he sold his blog to Sumrush. So there definitely were seeing more of that and I think it makes a lot of sense for businesses. In fact, I had an interview recently with Joe Pulizzi on this podcast, who record you know, the five unconventional content marketing strategies. One was, instead of Bill Buy, buy the Buy the blogs of the Grammar Oversings right he taught me in about five to seven years.

Speaker 1:

There we go. Well, graham, this has been awesome. Where can people go if they wanna find out more about you, connect with you, buy your books, your trainings and the whole bit?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so add me on LinkedIn for sure, and my blog is beloved-brandscom. Those are probably the two starting points. But, graham Robertson, on LinkedIn I've got about 35,000 followers and follow along or add me as a connection.

Speaker 1:

And I am assuming that we can also buy your books, not just Amazon Canada, but Amazon USA as well, right?

Speaker 3:

Yes, amazon Around the World and Apple Books and Kobo Rakuten as well.

Speaker 1:

The whole bit. All right, love it. Well, graham, thank you so much, for you were probably like wait, we just went from Twitter LinkedIn, now you're inviting me on your podcast. But I knew I just had this instinct that you had this story. That would really benefit a lot of people, including myself. So, thank you so much, my friend. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. All right, I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did.

Speaker 1:

Graham was just so giving with his advice and in many ways, I felt a lot of parallels with the growth of my own career, because everything that I do now really began from a blog as well, and I wish it had been a little bit more business focused. I try to live a life of no regrets, and I recommend you do as well. So it's all good. My success is coming a roundabout way, but we talk about the TikToks, the Instagram Reels, the social media, and we really forget that in some industries, the blog, as in Graham's case, can't really build your business. So I hope you found this episode helpful. And hey, are you signed up to my list?

Speaker 1:

I give away free resources, announcements, webinars, whatever I do. If you wanna be the first to know, make sure you go to neilshaffercom slash events. This is gonna be the easiest way to sign up to my newsletter so that I can keep you up to date on all the wonderful things happening. And, by the way, the next conference I plan on attending is going to be Vid Summit in Dallas, texas, in early October. If you plan to be there, let me know. We'd love to buy you a beer at least. All right, that's it for another episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastneilshaffercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilshaefercom to tap into the 400 plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First Group Coaching Membership Community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach.

Speaker 1:

I.