Table of Contents
Many marketers overfocus on content creation but then neglect distribution. In my podcast chat with the author of Create Once, Distribute Forever and Foundation Marketing founder, Ross Simmonds explains why ignoring distribution is one of the most costly mistakes most marketers make.
I was lucky to have met Ross years ago at Searchlove when I first started. Like on our podcast, Ross was incredibly knowledgeable and willing to share his “secrets” to success with me.
He didn’t shy away from sharing his secrets in our podcast conversation either.
In it you’ll learn his macro level marketing strategies down to the tactical level distribution methods that he’s been using to grow revenue for his clients for years.
Actionable Takeaways
Here are some actionable takeaways from our chat:
Create Once, Distribute Forever
The central idea of Ross’s book: Stop constantly creating new content. Instead, invest in high-value content that you can repurpose, remix, and redistribute repeatedly across various channels for long-term ROI. Assets like blog posts, studies, or PR pieces can continue to provide value if redistributed intelligently months or years later.
Digital PR and Content Have Synergy
Content developed for digital PR campaigns (e.g., infographics, data studies) can be repurposed. It’s not just one and done.
For instance, Ross shared how a PR piece about Xbox vs. PS4 gained renewed traction months later when reused with timely outreach.
Agencies Should Offer Distribution as a Service
Agencies can sometimes get caught up in the service offerings and pigeon hole themselves by only focusing on deliverables but miss out on selling distribution as a core offering. Ross recommends creating a separate line item specifically for distribution efforts to maximize value from existing content.
Diversify Outreach Channels
“Outreach” isn’t just about email. Ross emphasizes being “relentless” (yet thoughtful): use LinkedIn DMs, Reddit, Slack communities, and even Facebook groups. Find where your audience is and engage them there.
Identify the Right Platforms With Thorough Research
To connect content with the right audience, start with deep audience research. Use tools like Reddit, SparkToro, and social platforms to find where your target audience spends time and what content resonates with them. It might be they spend their time going to conferences or subscribing to specific newsletters.
Relationships Trump Scale in Outreach
AI tools can scale outreach but erode trust when overused. Ross advocates for human-first outreach: build familiarity, engage meaningfully, and then make your ask.
Relationships are harder to fake and more valuable long-term.
Focus on Results, Not Vanity Metrics
Marketers should align their work with revenue goals. Whether you’re in digital PR, content creation, or link building, connect your efforts to outcomes like organic traffic, leads, and revenue—metrics that matter to the business. If you haven’t set up metrics to track revenue goals as an agency or consultant, do that first.
Transcription
Here’s an edited transcription of our talk.
What made you decide to write a book?
Ross Simmonds: So yeah, it was like probably right before I’d say 2020, I was like at a point where I was like, okay, distribution is the thing.
I’m going all in on distribution. I’ve talked about distribution for quite some time. I need to really put my stamp on it as, kind of the distribution person.
So how can I do that?
And I thought like, why not write a book? Let’s let’s turn it into a book.
And that would be a great way to nurture relationships, the leads, and all that stuff.
And it was a labor of love because the book didn’t go live until 2024.
So four years later, after a pandemic, some babies, and all of that good stuff, I finally brought it to life.
And it’s been it’s been a joy to see how the market responded to it. Every single day I get a note from somebody somewhere in the world, which is wild to me saying that they’re reading a certain chapter to learn how to do marketing on Reddit or that they just finished my chapter on other people’s channels.
And it blew their mind that’s a way to grow. It’s been very cool to take.
A decade plus of experience and then put it into a book for someone to digest and get access to and hear my ideas and see my ideas. And it’s been it’s been rewarding to do. I’ve always been a big writer.
Like I wrote my first book called Stand Out, which is about marketing many moons ago, but it was like a self published PDF version.
And then I wrote a book called cracking the Reddit code that was, I don’t even remember the year’s time blurs altogether. So I’ve always liked writing, but I’ve never gotten the path of let’s do this thing for real with a proper book.
And I just wanted to take it up a notch.
The response has been great. People have loved Create Once Distribute Forever. The reviews have been awesome on Amazon, which is great. I always wake up wondering, Oh, am I going to get that one star today? And now that I said this so loud, I probably will.
But yeah, it was it was cool to see.
Vince: I, yeah, I loved it. I’m, I got about. 30 pages left. It’s like the playbook section. But yeah, it’s funny. I think you and I grew up around the same time. We’re probably around the same age, but got a lot of great references in there.
I feel like you mentioned Gargoyles.
Ross Simmonds: I did. I did. I threw in a lot of stuff for the nineties babies for the, and I’m talking.
Proper nineties, like you grew up in the nineties, not necessarily. You were bored in them all the time, but yeah, I dropped a lot of references that some folks wouldn’t pick up, but I’m glad you caught the Gargoyles reference that was my favorite show back in the day.
I loved it.
Vince: And, I, grew up outside of Philly you being an Eagles fan, even though you’re from Canada, it’s right. Yeah. There’s a lot of bond.
Ross Simmonds: We bond. I love it. Yeah. It’s wild. Like the Eagles connection literally only came from the video game. Like Madden was my thing.
And I was a beast when I was running around with their QB and I was like, all right, this is going to be my team. And there you go. Years later, I’m diehard.
Vince: Love it. You mentioned this earlier, but this idea of going all in on content distribution, now I. Remember maybe first meeting you at SearchLove San Diego.
And and I think it stood out and, and since then I’ve worked in through some of your previous stuff and yeah, the content distribution theme is very evident and you talk about this in your book, this idea that’s like counter to what my whole thought process has always been, but like this idea that you can probably stop doing marketing, halfway through the year and just use a lot of the stuff that you’ve done and especially when you talk about the content side of things, like writing blogs and repurposing for everything.
So I want to talk about that, and it’s intersection into a lot of our listeners in digital PR, right?
So that’s one Avenue, right? Like it is creating these great pieces, even if you’re an agency, you’re creating these great pieces for a client, but. There’s so much more juice you could squeeze out of this stuff.
Can you really stop creating new content halfway through the year and start repurposing?
Ross Simmonds: I a hundred percent agree with you on that. I think it’s oftentimes assumed that every single week, you need to have a new campaign with new ideas and new stories that are going out to the market.
But in reality, it’s very likely that a story that you told in Q1 could be just as relevant to the market to journalists and reporters today than it was back then.
It might even be more relevant, right?
If you are able, I remember we did a piece. It was a digital PR piece.
This is, I’m going to go way back in time, but it was like when Xbox 360 came out versus PS4.
And we were like, we put a bunch of data around the sentiment on social around these two games and which one was going to have a bigger launch and we brought to life this like massive infographic, this amazing research and it was great.
We press publish on it. All the gaming sites picked it up and they were referencing it, linking to it. Then, the day of the release—we were like, let’s repurpose and share this again.
So we went this time, though, to like tier one media. So we went out to New York Times.
We went out to big publications and they all bit because it was now more relevant. After all, they were seeing an increase in people talking about these games going live at that moment.
But for a lot of folks, they think, “Oh, we did this once we’ve reached everybody and then we’re done.”
But in reality, some of those ideas, some of that research, some of the data can be brought to life back to your market.
Over and over again, literally for decades sometimes. And just continue to pay dividends through links, media, traffic, shares, leads, conversions, and so many things.
So when I wrote the book, Create Once, Distribute Forever, it was thinking not about just writing a AI assisted blog post.
I’m not saying to create a mediocre piece of content and then distribute it forever.
You’re going to get met with crickets.
You might even get banned from 50 percent of the sites that you’re on.
But if you can take a very valuable asset that is created with a deep understanding of humans, the reason why we share things, the reason why we want things, consume things in your ICP.
You can literally distribute that forever because people will always want it.
People will always be interested. And when you get to a point where you’ve reached everyone, congratulations, then you did it, right? If you’ve reached everyone, well done, give me your number. Like I want to chat with you.
There’s so many people in the world. So that’s my MO and my philosophy around the entire approach.
Vince: Yeah, thinking about this kind of technically for saying agency, like the first, gut reaction I had to this is usually when you’re working with an agency and not all agencies do this, but some of the ones that I used to work for if you’re not working in a retainer model, you’re usually working like a per project basis.
Right?
Is this something that agencies can implement as a service offering? Is this something that you recommend that agencies do? And if so, like, how does that work, technically, when you’re selling this, even if you are a product based kind of, or, Yeah, I’m going to deliver four blog posts a month or something like, getting more from that model.
Can an agency create a model like this?
Ross Simmonds: So I think it’s literally another line item that is exclusively around distribution. So you have your creation line item, which are the things that you’re going to develop net new.
And let’s say you deliver them every quarter or every month, you can do that. That works.
But then in addition to that, you need to have a line item around distribution.
And for us at Foundation, distribution can be outreach.
Distribution can also be a bucketed effort around repurposing content for social and spreading it out on Reddit.
And like we’re going into subreddits and crafting net new content.
Like those folks are doing that type of stuff through our distribution experts.
We just have a full line item that is exclusively focused on distribution, which is informed by a strategy that is done upfront.
So in the strategy up front, we align with our partners to say, “okay, what types of assets do we need to create?”
Let’s say that we need to create 15 pieces over the course of a calendar year and every 15 each of these pieces are like 10x content.
Like we’re talking heavy research, lots of data, lots of visuals, graphics.
It’s like chef’s kiss thought leadership stuff. Okay?
We’re going to do that 15 times.
Now, after three quarters, we might say that is going to cost X, Y, and Z.
We’ve gotten to the end of the third quarter. We recognize we’re going into the winter months.
So we’re going to scale down on our production of net new, but we’re going to ramp up on distribution. So you use that additional budget to potentially just like circumvent the fact that you’re not producing as much, but instead you’re going to be distributing more to get some buzz and some hype on some of those things that you’ve already invested in.
So that’s the way that we approach it.
It’s definitely tailored around the partner and the client. But for some engagements, they just want us to do distribution exclusive. So they’ll have a content creation partner and that partner’s creating creating. And then we take those assets, turn them into social posts, turn them into LinkedIn carousels, turn them into stories for IG, or we’ll take it.
We’ll conduct the reach. One partner has This amazing research that they’ve created over the years. And it’s okay, cool. Some of this is outdated. We’re going to update it.
And then we’re going to start running the distribution engine after an optimization process has taken place. So the 1st 2 quarters of that engagement is, let’s get the foundation laid.
Name completely intended around like good content.
And then for the rest of our engagement, we’re just going to repurpose and reshare this stuff and distribute it because you’ve already got content. Excellent. Long story to a short question. There’s a lot of different ways to do it, but I think the biggest thing that I would advise content agencies.
And again, this is me giving away our own secret sauce is I think there’s a massive opportunity in the content distribution space that a lot of content marketing agencies sleep on.
And they sleep on it because it’s not something that is product focused. It’s not like “here’s your deliverable”, right?
Like with distribution, you do not necessarily have to sell hours, but you’re selling the engine, which happens daily.
So you’re allocating your team’s time hourly to execute these tasks—not knowing exactly what the deliverables will be because sometimes it might be email outreach.
Sometimes it might be submissions in Reddit.
And one Reddit post might take two seconds and another might take two hours.
And it varies depending on a lot of different circumstances that are outside of the control. But I think it’s the best thing that you can do for clients is to ensure that they’re distributing their stories.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. You have a fantastic kind of breakdown in the book the different platforms and how you recommend, finding them and distributing the content in or on those platforms. One other thing I wanted to really get out of this is this conversation, this podcast episode is how you think of outreach, not in distribution, like they’re not mutually exclusive.
Like you can do email outreach. You can do social outreach. And a lot of agencies do this. A lot of great digital PRs utilize this already. But. I feel like you have even a wider scope than just I might do it on email and social.
You get a lot into this in your book. I was wondering if you could touch on some of those kind of alternative outreach or distribution ideas and tactics.
What are some of the alternative outreach and distribution tactics?
Ross Simmonds: I think it’s there’s a thin line that every marketer needs to ensure that they do not cross, right? There’s the path of being relentless with getting the attention of the people you want to reach.
And there’s the path of being too spammy that everybody wants you to F off and never talk to them again.
I believe truly that too many of us are passive with outreach, with communication. If I was to go back into time in my early days, where I was doing a lot of outreach myself, I would hit people up in the DMs on X/Twitter.
DMs on LinkedIn.
I would even sometimes see that they happen to submit a post into a Reddit and I would send them a DM on Reddit. Like I would be very intentional.
I’d find out if they had a Facebook page, I’d write the Facebook page, all of those things. I never really did Facebook profiles.
I’d always thought personal profiles was like my one area that I would never go.
But LinkedIn, I’m always open to DMs on a channel like Reddit, always open to X, always open to even like a Discord these days.
I’d be open to one of the things that I also find amazing is like Slack communities. So you go into Slack communities and you can get connected immediately to be like one degree of separation from people who you want to do business with and you want to collaborate with.
Don’t get me wrong. This can lead to spammy people doing a lot of spammy things, but I believe if you can go into these communities and you can find the right people and you can DM them and build relationships, you can unlock new opportunities for outreach, for partnerships, for collaborations.
When I first wrote for Social Media Examiner, and this was taking you back I was, let me set the stage.
I was living in my parent’s basement.
I was probably like 5 000 in overdraft fees. I had no money, no credibility, no industry, real experience. It’s out of working for like Nestle and a few big companies. And I was like, bottom of the barrel, figuring it all out. And I was like, I need towrite for Social Media Examiner.
Like they’re big.
So how could I get a publication with them? I had to do outreach and I live in Nova Scotia. This is a small place.
I can’t go across the street and shake hands and kiss babies with some big wigs and get myself in there. So I had to do outreach. But my approach to outreach was simple.
I had a list on X, where every time somebody who worked at Social Media Examiner was sending a tweet, I was liking it.
And I was replying that gave my name now familiarity.
So I viewed it like the video game, the Sims, some of the listeners will know what I’m talking about, but in the Sims, you get like these points for relationships.
So I viewed every it’s like a one point. “Ooh, I got them today. I’m going to like it tomorrow.”
And I’m going to do this for two weeks just to build familiarity.
And I’m going to respond, which is going to give me three points. And then eventually I’m going to send them a DM and I’m going to try to cash in all that credibility that I established by nurturing that relationship.
And eventually, I came in because I saw that, I think it was Instagram just launched. Like I’m talking way back, Instagram launched and I was like, “Hey folks, can I write a piece for you about the ways that you can use Instagram, the ultimate guide to Instagram marketing, “or something like that. “And here’s why I think I would be good at this.”
And I just link to many blog posts I wrote on RossSimmonds.com and they were like, “yeah, of course you can do this.”
Because they had familiarity with me because I was in their DMS in the past.
I was responding to them. I was replying. I felt like I was a part of the community and they accepted it.
So then I did that four more times for them. And each of those pieces led to links to my site. It led to more press because back then SlideShare was huge. So I took all of my SlideShare presentations and I was embedding those in there. That was like the original YouTube for B2B. And those presentations were getting millions of views on the back of those articles going live.
And it just took off. So I don’t know what the question even was that you asked that led me down this point. But. Outreach. Yes. Be relentless.
Like my advice to people is be relentless, view it like a game and try to build relationships before you go in for the ask. Don’t hesitate to go into different channels and communicate right and reach out.
Email is still always going to be the GOAT.
There’s nothing better than an email that’s well-crafted and well-researched.
But I think you need to be open to trying other things because the inbox is more chaotic now than ever before.
Vince: Yeah, it’s funny. I feel like that last statement you just said was probably something we said 10 years ago and it’s just getting worse and worse, right?
And I totally agree like the I kind of call it the “Double Touch” method when you’re doing outreach where it’s like you reach out on one platform and then you know get a familiar face in there so that you’re not new and I’ve seen tremendous success from that.
And to your point, I think it’s what a lot of the great digital PRs do and like more traditional PRs too, where it’s like they’re cultivating relationships.
And you can draw the line across to link builders too. It’s like you’re cultivating relationships. And, but I think the way that this gets misconstrued or can fail is when you do try to scale too quickly.
And that’s put the bad mark, on a lot of that outreach.
And I’m curious if you felt that, if you felt that kind of push recently, we’re seeing Google doing a lot of new things and wondering how that all plays into the content distribution?
Have you seen changes in Google that play into the need for content distribution?
Ross Simmonds: yeah, I think what we’re all seeing is two things happen at the same time.
One, the opportunity that exists due to AI is increasing the necessity and the opportunity to have a significant scale.
But while that takes place, there is an increasing number of people who are receiving these stories at an accelerated rate, which are making it more and more important to have a strong relationship because of it.
So while AI is accelerating the efficiencies, the productivity, the amount of trust that people have with things that are showing up in their inbox—even if it’s a video or a DM — is reduced because yes, the efficiencies are giving brands and businesses and sellers, outreach professionals, a ridiculous amount of scale and success today.
But the number of people on the receiving end of that are seeing their trust for the entire market reduce is at an all-time high.
And it’s continuing to depreciate very quickly.
And I think what that means is simply a double down on what you just said.
Relationships are becoming more and more important in business then ever before.
You can’t fake a strong relationship.
You either have it or you don’t.
And the way that you build a strong relationship isn’t with as many AI-written content emails as you think you can send.
Like you can send 40 AI generated emails. And have one person say, “Hey, thank you.”
And think it’s real, but if you can tailor it and be human and like really inject yourself into it, that’s more likely to land and more likely to resonate, especially when you’re able to do it without the AI element, or at least not so much AI that is obvious to a point where there’s a connection with people.
And I think we’re going into a world where we all have to find that balance between, “ow much should I use AI to automate outreach, automate distribution, communication, content creation,” vs “how important is it that people really know that there’s a human on the other end of this?”
I’ve been toying around with tools that allow you to send emails with a deepfake version of me saying, Hey, Vince. Hey, James. Hey, Jill. Hey, Jack. Hey, Alisha. Hey, Kim.
It will say any name that I insert as a part of that script. Now, it’s pretty cool to think about. I was blown away when I first saw somebody write an email that said, Hey, Ross.
Imagine now, Ross, saying your name whenever you want to whoever you want at scale.
It’s a fascinating technology.
When it first goes live, and as people start to roll it out today, I think a lot of people are not even going to know that it’s AI, but over time, I think we’re going to start to see more and more cracks in the armor and people actually get more backlash against it.
So, while it works, I advise people to use it, but when it doesn’t work, you’re going to go back to the basics of just good old-fashioned relationships.
Vince: Yeah, I’ve seen some nowadays that will, it looks like it’s taking from my LinkedIn bio. Yeah. And it’ll craft a personalized message somewhat, but it’s like a little off, “Oh, I saw that you went to so and so school.”
Like it’s taking from different bios that I’ve written. Fascinating.
Ross Simmonds: Fascinating.
Vince: But yeah, it’s not quite there. And you can kind tell, right? You can tell.
Ross Simmonds: Or at least like you can tell if you’re savvy enough to be in this world, right?
If you’re, if you are someone who does the diligence to understand AI tools and you can put two and two together, you’re gonna see it. If you sent that to my mom, she’s not going to have a clue. She’s going to think “Oh, cool. That’s wild that this person sent you that.”
But I do think that’s where the world’s going.
I think we’re going to live in a world where eventually it’s going to be very difficult to know which will be wild on its own.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. So when we talk about the future of, let’s say, content marketing in general or actually before we do that, Maybe let’s get our terminologies straight because I just did this online.
I did a poll on digital PR specifically. So when I’m talking about digital PR, I’m talking about reaching out to top tier news, pitching them either, quotes or data studies that you’ve done, whatever to get either brand mentions or links back to a specific place on your website.
When we get into like “Link building”, right? There’s like the SEO component of it.
There’s more traditional broken link buildings, that sort of thing.
And then I think the ones that start to blur the lines, it’s like content marketing, right?
Maybe encompasses, like those are tactics, digital PR, like building, or maybe like building is a, or digital PR is a link building tactic.
And then there’s content promotion content distribution. Do you just put anything that’s going out? Any content-related stuff that’s going out is your content distribution bucket.
How do you define content distribution?
Ross Simmonds: So anything where you’re taking an asset that has already been invested in and created and then spreading it, whether you’re repackaging it or resharing it or remixing it or sending it as an email and trying to get more love for it, that is distribution.
The distribution of that asset.
To me, it is content distribution.
So when you take a piece of content that has been created and you try to get it additional reach and additional eyeballs on it and attention, that is the distribution process.
So for me, when I talk about content marketing, I’m often thinking in four key buckets content creation, distribution, optimization, and then research.
So on the optimization side, it’s the ongoing technical optimization, CRO, generative engine optimization, SEO, proper on site optimization, all that good stuff, internal linking, you name it, that world is optimization.
The distribution is what we’ve been talking about.
It’s digital PR, it’s backlink, it’s social, it’s tactical from social. It’s like Facebook, LinkedIn. Quora, you name it, all of those things.
On the creation side, we’re talking about YouTube. We’re talking about blog posts. We’re talking about eBooks. We’re talking about white papers. We’re talking about podcasts.
It’s the creation of an actual asset.
And then the practice of content marketing to me is those four things.
It’s the development of highly qualified, great content assets, distributing them, optimizing them, doing research to inform what the net new ones should be and how to improve the ones that you’ve already created.
Vince: Yeah, very clear. Brilliantly put, I think when we’re talking about content, so we’re talking about content distribution. Yeah. Now, do you feel like this is something that all brands can do at this point? Like it should invest in?
Is content distribution something all brands should invest in?
Ross Simmonds: I do. I’ve done marketing campaigns with organizations that sell dirt.
I’ve done them with organizations that sell the sand that goes into the bunkers at golf courses. We’ve done it for waste management companies. We’ve done it with the widgets that go into lasers at roller coasters and like all of that stuff. So I don’t think I’ve met an industry that can’t benefit from this.
I would love to meet them. I want to meet them. I want to know what it is.
And if you are listening to this and you work at a company where you’re like, doesn’t work in our space, hit me up. I want the challenge.
I would love to know where this stuff doesn’t work.
Vince: Yeah. And your book again, like, puts this well, and very clearly, this idea that, like, you might like the problems that some people run into and that make you think that content promotion is not content distribution, sorry, isn’t something that’s relevant or going to work, necessarily in their business is just.
Maybe you just haven’t found the right platform, right?
Ross Simmonds: Exactly. And I think that’s more often than not the problem. I think most people just don’t find the right platform, or they are actually not creating content that’s worth sharing, that their audience doesn’t care about. That could also be the problem.
The problem could be that they have mediocre content, bad content, they’re only talking about their new hires, how they just raised a round of Funding. They might only talk about their company retreats and they’re wondering why no one’s talking about them, but no one cares about that stuff. So that could be the problem too.
Vince: Yeah let’s dig into that a little bit. Okay, so you’re a new company. And I’ve run into this a lot. I remember 1 of the 1st projects I did I worked with the founder is very passionate about electrical engineering, this thing that he had created. And he was all about doing content about how it was being created.
And he wanted to interview other engineers and that sort of thing, but didn’t really have any sight into the customers who would ultimately be buying the product that all this was going into. How do you recommend people find those platforms and find the right stories to produce or to distribute?
How do you identify the right stories to produce and distribute?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah, for sure. So it starts by understanding your audience.
So if you don’t know your audience, you have a big problem because who are you selling to? Why are you creating this thing?
So you start there.
Let’s start by figuring out who our ideal customers are: The people who we want to buy our product or service or solution.
Once you have clarity around who that is, you’re going to research to understand the channels that they’re spending time on for this purpose. Let’s pretend that that engineer is in the mechanical engineering space. We will take that person and say, okay, what solution are you trying to offer?
Are you selling something for CIOs? Okay.
Chief information officers are your target audience. Then I’m going to research to understand the brands that already have the attention of chief information officers. Okay.
How can I figure that out? I can go to social media and use channels like LinkedIn.
I can use tools like SparkToro.
I can use tools like Reddit and Google and do search and research to see if there are newsletters that target CIOs.
Are there accounts on LinkedIn that focus exclusively on that ICP?
Are there networking groups?
Are there media companies?
Are there conferences?
Are there people who are running events on a regular basis that go out and try to attract these people?
Are there round table sessions being held by the McKinsey’s of the world, where these people come together every year to just sit down and hear about a few different topics? If so, now you have clarity about where your people are spending time.
So let’s say that roundtable exists.
I’m now going to find out who was there and who went to that roundtable.
I’m going to see what speakers were there and what they talked about because that will now give me an insight into content market fit.
If people were willing to invest their actual money in their budgets to attend an event where five people were talking about these certain things, then it’s likely if I can create content on these same things for free on my website, that people will be interested and they will want to consume it.
So I’m going to use those ideas as a starting point for my assets. I’m then going to use a keyword research tool to understand what are things that these people would be looking for on a regular basis within their job, maybe even connected back to these topics that I found on the round table combo.
And see if I can find any assets using like an Ahrefs or even a Buzzsumo or something.
It’s the one that tracks like social shares. I want to see how often these pieces are getting shared. And then I’m going to use that to inform further. Okay, these are pieces that I should create.
Then I might find out that there’s a newsletter. Okay.
There’s an entire newsletter that is press publish on pieces of content in this industry. For the last eight years, I’m going to take their URL. I’m going to submit it into Reddit and I’m going to type in site colon, that domain press enter. And I’m going to see if there are any posts in Reddit that have generated over a hundred upvotes over a hundred comments.
Because what that tells me is that these pieces got the people talking. And that means we probably have another asset and an idea that has content market fit. Oh, while I’m there, it turns out there’s a entire subreddit dedicated to CIOs.
So I’m going to go into that subreddit and I’m going to sort the content by top posts and see again, what topics got the people going.
I’m going to export all of those. I’m going to put them in the same doc that I had with my high round table discussions. Now, I have a list of content ideas, probably 20 to 30, that were highly valuable assets and stories that were told in the past that can inform my content calendar in the future.
Once I have that, two things have now happened.
One, I know exactly what type of content this market wants.
Two, I now know that they watch, they’re on Reddit.
I now know that they actually spent a lot of time on this newsletter, and I know that they go to these higher-end events. So maybe I should get a booth there or sponsor it or something.
So I have validated three channels where I will distribute my content.
I’m going to I’ve identified 30 plus topics that I know we’re going to resonate with these people. I now need to bring them to life and then distribute them like wildfire on the channels that they’re spending time. And that’s the playbook.
Vince: Yeah, that was great. You went through a lot there, but it’s obvious, right? And you had a line in the book. It was basically like, I think at some of this all up, it was like, find out what your competitors are doing. Do it better than that.
That seems to be the way to condense that all down. But I do like that there are so many nuggets like this in the book again, I highly recommend checking it out because you get into the kind of nuances of the different platforms.
And, you’ve been one of them, I didn’t even know about, but like buying defunct Facebook pages.
Can you expand on your idea of buying defunct Facebook pages?
Ross Simmonds: Its an amazing opportunity, but it’s on the hush a little bit. I get that one. But it is a ridiculous opportunity, right? I talk about it in the book. I was able to acquire a page or a group for three grand and then in the matter of two or three weeks, I shared a few articles with links to products and they made three grand.
So it’s like the opportunity there is wild.
You can find these groups with tons and tons of people itching like no one joins a Facebook group for the fun of it.
You join it because you’re interested in an idea. Okay. Let me switch that back. You do join for the fun of it.
But it’s with intention because you know that this is you.
If I join a group dedicated to dads in Canada, then if you came in and you had a bunch of cool sweaters for dads in Canada who are always cold, you’re going to make sales. You’re going to make sales.
The only people in that group are dads in Canada. No one in Philly is joining that group.
There’s no reason to, unless you’re an expat, right?
Like those things you have the opportunity to do with these groups.
The beauty of Facebook versus Reddit is that it’s not anonymized, right? Like the fact that it’s not anonymized on Facebook makes people even stay more real and more like human and not roast you versus Reddit, where they’ll tell you where to go and how to get there because you can’t track who they are.
Vince: Yeah. And the way that you speak about this stuff brings up a broader theme. I think that you and I spoke about, I also spoke to a Rand Fishkin about on this podcast, the founder of SparkToro, which you’ve mentioned a couple of times. And it’s this, kind of theme that I’m seeing more and more.
And I’m gravitating more and more towards this, this idea of the power of thinking about the product and your site and marketing as a whole versus this is my deliverable. I’m a digital PR. I’m a link builder, and I’m just building links. I’m creating, I’m a content creator. I’m creating stuff on the blog to get that traffic up.
But one of the things that Rand really pushed, and I feel this reading a book, is like constantly like asking yourself,”okay, but what does that do for the customers? What does that do for the bottom line?”
And the brands that really are successful at this, and the marketers like yourself, the agencies that do this well, do think of that full funnel.
And and even if you’re hired to just do one specific thing, right?
It’s like talking to the right people to make sure that the ends meet, that your marketing efforts are connecting with.
The traditional PR team is doing the sales team and the customer service team are doing.
So, what are some tips that you have for people who get this kind of myopic view of what they’re doing and don’t see the forest and the trees?
How do you recommend people learn this skill?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah great question because I think it comes with experience and recognizing like where you want to show up in the marketing engine at large, right?
I oftentimes think that marketers should think it’s very similar to the way that like physicians think and their entire field thinks like one, we should strive to do no harm.
That’s a whole other topic that we’re not going to get into.
But in addition to that, we should think about whether or not you want to be a generalist or specialist, right?
You can be a generalist who has a broad scope of a lot of different things, or you can be a specialist and you can be exclusively focused on one lane and be really good at that lane.
And you don’t really come out of your lane. And that’s okay.
I’m not saying that if you are one of the best SEOs in the world that you should say, I need to go and learn PPC.
I’m not saying that at all. I’m not saying if you are one of the best people on TikTok at creating video content in the world that you should say, I need to learn programmatic SEO.
I’m not saying that at all, but I think that as you strive, some people strive in their career to get to a more leadership level role.
It’s important to be very good, probably not, probably in the 10 percent of something, but then across everything else being like the 75 percent tile, right?
Like or at least the 50 percent tile, 25 percent tile, like you’re not necessarily the best in the world at these things, but you’re good enough to be able to hire, coach, train, lead, direct, and bring people around you to execute different pieces.
And for me, I would give folks who want to get a broad scope to join small companies.
Join small companies because you’re forced to wear multiple hats.
If you join a larger brand in a larger company, you might necessarily just have a hat on your head, and that’s exclusively all you do every single day, every week.
That’s it.
Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just saying like that can happen.
But if you join a smaller company, let’s say under a hundred people, that company likely have you bouncing around from one project to the next, and you’ll get to learn about different things.
And from those lessons, you’ll be able to stretch it out. So you can have a more holistic viewpoint.
And if you are at an organization where you don’t have the opportunity to go outside of your silo, I am a massive believer in doing your own side projects.
I think the side projects are a great way for you to learn.
You can start a side project on something that you’re passionate about.
For me, it was a fantasy football blog. I was in university. That was my full time job.
Let’s pretend that like I got paid to go to school instead of paying them. But that was my full time thing was in school, but I learned everything about search and about communities.
And then I challenged myself while I got into the, my full time gig where I was like a social media manager to run Rosssimmons.com and optimize that site for search.
Then, I continue to challenge myself to figure out things like SlideShare and Reddit.
And then I got banned, but I came back and you do these things over and over again.
And I think my advice to people would be to run your own experiments, like experiment with things tinker, learn, write, create your own projects because those own projects that you have could also become very rewarding on their own.
Vince: So you kind of outline tips for people who are maybe, side projects works, I think, for people who are like stuck, say in-house somewhere. Yeah. I think what I’m trying to get to is say you’re finding that the work that you’re doing isn’t connecting the dots with the broader picture and isn’t impacting the bottom line.
We’ve all been there where you get stuck in some of these like vanity metrics, right? Where ultimately, like you see that all the time on LinkedIn and social, people talking about, oh, look at how much traffic I generated, but at the end of the day, What is that doing for the brand? What about connecting the dots that way?
How do you make sure marketers don’t lose sight of a brand’s business objectives?
Ross Simmonds: I think you have to think like an investor.
So, you have to take a step back from your marketing seat and put on a hat where you’re thinking, “okay, what are the business goal and objective? What does the business care about?”
A lot of people make the mistake of saying, “okay, but what does my manager care about?”
If the manager is stuck into vanity metrics as well, you’re still going to be stuck.
So go above even them, maybe.
And then if that person is still stuck, then go again.
And if that person is still vanity metrics, then go to a new company because you’re going to fail in a few years.
My focus would be to figure out the business goals and objectives.
It’s likely going to be something like revenue. It’s likely going to be that you’re in the revenue function.
So, I think for marketers, we need to start talking more about business terms.
So marketing is in the revenue function, right?
There’s sales and there’s marketing. You make up together the revenue function.
So, at the end of the day, you should lead to revenue.
How do you drive revenue?
How you do that depend on the types of marketing leverage that you pull and your product, your solution, your service, all of those things matter.
So once you have that understanding, you now need to ask yourself, okay, what I’m doing, how does that lead to revenue?
It might be four steps away. Cool.
If it’s four steps away, you need to figure out how you can access the data that demonstrates that the things you do lead to an outcome that it gets close to revenue.
A lot of people in digital PR and outreach typically measure things like links.
You’re measuring things like how much press you get, all of these things.
Cool.
Those are nice, but you can’t throw it into an investor’s report. Ask yourself how you can get close to the data that would show up in an investor’s report, AKA how much pipeline, not even pipeline, let’s take it a step further than pipeline.
Like how much revenue are you able to generate from organic traffic? Because of the links?
You’re creating the press that you’re creating ideally is seeing an increase in organic.
So you’re going to go into your CRM, or you’re going to go into your e-commerce dashboard, whatever it is, depending on your space, your affiliate dashboard, depending on your space, like all of those things.
And you’re going to see how organic is contributing to sales.
If you have a sales team because you’re B2B, how is it contributing to leads?
Then you’re tracking those leads. And you might say, “but Ross, I’m just doing backlink outreach. I’m just doing digital PR. I’m just trying to get some press, media, and buzz.”
All of that is fair, but when it comes down to it, if you can’t show that the things that you are doing are leading to a better business outcome and result, then you are going to be the first one on the chopping block to say this person is not driving ROI for this business.
When you do the math on that, you can show it to your manager, your leader, and your department, and they will say thank you because you’re keeping them safe.
You’re keeping them in their jobs more secure because now you have data that they should have been getting in the first place.
And now you can spin that up even further.
I would advise people to stop thinking exclusively about the metrics that are marketing and start thinking about business and how you can connect it back.
It might mean to go a higher level, and even though don’t influence and control all of the things that get there, you need to be able to show that there’s an ounce of impact that you’re having on organic, which is leading to net new revenue, which is leading to profit.
And if you can do that, then well done, that’s the goal.
Vince: Yeah that’s great advice for anybody. I can think of a lot of companies that I’ve worked with in the past that don’t even have the analytics together, and you find yourself as an agency, you’re like, working in a silo, right?
Like they just hired you to do this one thing and you can’t even prove it. And it’s on you as the agency or the freelance or whatever consultant to push them to build X percent.
Ross Simmonds: Yeah, we work with our partners up front to make sure we’re getting access to HubSpot if they’re using it because we want to be able to show attribution and show that the leads that our content is generating is leading to the pipeline, which is leading to sales.
And there’s no better slide — it was probably like seven ish years ago where I developed my first report and I was able to show that a blog post resulting in a 2 million deal.
And I was like, “this is it. Give me this all day. Cause they can’t fire me. They can’t fire me.”
And when you have those things, it just changes the entire dynamic. So, I encourage people to try their hardest.
And this is, again, I’ll give away the book to any competitor.
Find a way to get access to your client’s data.
It’s the most important thing you can do because you can’t even serve them well if you don’t know that the things that you’re doing are not leading to a better business outcome.
So you have to have those conversations with them and send them this podcast and let them know “Hey, listen to what Ross and Vince are saying. We need to know how we’re impacting the bottom line of the business. And this is why.”
Vince: Yeah. Put. Last thing I’ve had a post of yours bookmarked and I come back to it sometimes.
And you talked about how important it is to maintain the marketing strategies that you’ve laid out and be consistent versus changing every couple of weeks because some podcast guru just told you to.
How do you decide on a strategy that is going to be the one to stick with?
Cause you’ve laid out a ton, like even when you’re talking about content distribution, it’s there’s tons of venues you can go to. So yeah. What is it? That ultimately makes that final call for you.
How do you ultimately decide on a strategy that works?
Ross Simmonds: I think it comes down to market fatigue. When the market is fatigued by the approach and they’re no longer responding in the way that they did in the first two to three quarters of your approach, that’s when you stop.
You have to start with an allocation and understanding of your resources. For a simple math, let’s say we have 100. 80 worth of your effort and energy, 80 percent of your effort is going to go to things that you believe are going to work and they’re going to be cash cows and they should be cash cows and they’re working in the driving results.
Cool. Keep that going. Eventually, you’re going to probably see a little bit of a cliff. Okay. Ideally, though, you’ve allocated 20 percent of your efforts to high risk things. Things that are a little bit scary that your competitors would never do. And what you’re hopefully going to do is you’re going to strike gold on one of those experiments.
You’re going to see that Reddit is actually worth doubling down your investment.
After two years of doing ABC, which worked extremely well, but it’s starting to decline.
You were also experimenting with a niche channel, but not going all in, but you’ve seen signals, you’ve seen light, you’ve seen opportunities, you’ve seen spikes.
Now that you’re seeing that decline, shift your allocation to Reddit and start to see if you can increase and surpass your own wildest imaginations as it relates to opportunity.
And if you do, that’s your new thing.
Everybody in marketing tends to play this copycat game. Instead of recognizing the best practices came from somebody who went against the best practice at some point.
So if you find the new best practice before your competition, because you’re experimenting, you can now shift your budget to that again.
Do not go all in right away on something that you hear on a podcast. We’ve talked about a lot of wild ideas. I don’t want everyone to say, “Vince and Ross. We just bought a bunch of Facebook groups.”
I don’t do that.
Like we’re not, I’m not saying that, but what I’m saying is maybe you find one that has thousands of people who are your exact ICP, and you start a conversation, and if you can acquire i,t and then you drop some links and you drop some traffic and see, can you monetize this thing?
You are okay. Maybe for your next year’s budget, you need to increase your budget and spend on groups and reduce on something that’s no longer working, like SlideShare or Quora, and go all in on groups.
That’s the way that I would approach it.
Vince: Yeah. That makes total sense.
For brands out there who don’t think of it that way, maybe your marketing is just a big marketing mix, right?
And you, it’s an amorphous and that’s probably most companies. It’s a lot. A lot of them. It seems one big takeaway, at least from this conversation is to really drill down those allocations and really understand what you’re getting out of them. And is that something you do?
We talked about cyclical after the first two quarters. Is that like something you would recommend people evaluate on a quarterly basis? Just like how are my channels doing every quarter?
How often do you evaluate the success of a marketing method?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah. I would say we look at it every year. Quarterly—as long as it is in marketing world— it’s actually not that long of a time, right?
Three months isn’t that long of a sprint.
So we typically look at it annually to get a better glimpse of year-over-year comparisons.
Quarterly, we’re doing a review, and we might pivot things that are a little bit less costly but less influential.
So, for example, a topic will shift. If we notice that there’s a shift over the quarter where an algorithm has changed, LinkedIn’s algorithm changes where video is hot.
Okay, folks, we should probably not wait until next year to go all in on video.
We need to change that now because they just put video on the app’s homepage.
What do you think we should do?
You don’t do it six months from now. The algorithm is going to change again. So, for those conversations, we move quickly.
But if it’s a massive shift between channel to channel, you’re going from LinkedIn to Reddit, we typically are looking at those on a year-old type of basis.
Still, I think that’s such a, I think it’s important that people think about the trends that are changing across all of these things, like even with outreach, right?
Like you look at how often the primary boxes and secondary, all that stuff changes in a few quarters.
It’s okay, but I have to switch it up.
So we all have to be on our toes. We all have to be agile.
And I think my biggest pieces of advice for any great marketing culture would be to embrace one: experimentation and two: agility.
Be able to listen to your team and shift when necessary instead of getting too stuck in doing the same thing over and over again because it worked a few years ago.
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