How To Blog And Brand To Help Your Business

How To Blog And Brand To Help Your Business

Elizabeth Pampalone
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
3/25/2021

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

you devin are a consumer if you were going to hire you to do the job you do what would you look for and what would you want to know and i think we forget that we're consumers we look at it as business owners we look at it as marketers we look at it as the person building the thing [Music] 

hey everyone this is devin miller here with another uh episode of the inventive journey i'm your host evan miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks and if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help now today we've got another great expert episode for the podcast and this is with elizabeth pampa loan i think is it close and uh a little bit this is this is a quick introduction kind of what we'll be talking about so she is with kind of digital marketing expert or is it kind of an expert in marketing and whatnot been doing this for quite a good period of time and we're going to talk a little bit more about the kind of the topics of what you know blogging branding and kind of website design and kind of how that all meshes together and how that can help your business uh to grow and expand so with that much as an introduction welcome on to the podcast elizabeth 

thank you so much for having me i really appreciate it 

absolutely so maybe before we dive into the topic at hand tell us a little bit about yourself or why you're an expert on this field and why the audience to listen to you well i've been in business for 14 years and i've had my marketing thing kind of going on for about 20 so i've been building websites since then and i just really love marketing and helping people to find that sweet spot without having to go overboard and overwhelm themselves and really to just get their marketing done so they can move on to all the other stuff which is what they're really good at awesome well i definitely think that that's a good pedigree and a good amount of experience behind you so kind of with that let's just go ahead and dive into some of the expertise at hand so to speak so maybe the first topic we'll talk a little bit about is blogging and so you know blogging is as as opposed to some of the more recent ones has been around for a reasonable amount of period of time you can reach back 

i think almost probably 20 years or into the early 2000s at least so people at least started blogs in some form or fashion so one question i would have is is blogging dead is it alive and well is it helpful is it worthwhile and and if so kind of what are what are the reasons why you get into blogging other than you know if your personal blogging just want to you know write down kind of almost an online journal that's one thing but if you're on the business side what are the what are the reasons why you get into blogging 

well blogging i actually use it for seo so i'm actually not looking at it from the standpoint of let's just blog for the sake of blogging or let's just blog so we can get our ideas out there that's one way of doing it but at the same time you know you want to actually blog so that you're getting the information out there that google's going to pick up so when i do a blog i'm looking at it from the standpoint of what's going to the customer i'm looking for what are they actually gonna search and most of the time they're searching questions google is not a search engine anymore it's a question engine so i try to say well let's look at your faqs they probably would make a ton of good blog posts so we look at things in that way so that we're actually utilizing the the businesses information they already have on hand to create blogs and then use them for seo purposes it takes three to six months for anything to actually get into google where it's actually being searched and being used in searches 

so i try to get people to set up a year of blogs in advance so that they're already on that track to say you know by mid year end of year i'm going to actually be seeing traction from this but they can kind of set it and forget it in that way so how do you so and i think that's definitely insightful and just for those of you that are new or in other ways you know seo is search engine optimization kind of just and explain helps you to rank well on google so it's kind of what google uses in order to determine whether you're on the first page or the hundredth page and nobody looks at the 100th page so that's kind of what you're doing it but you know you talk about a year of blogging you know one a couple you know commit or feedback or you know things that startups or small businesses have one is that you know how do i come up with enough topics and then you know how do i not have it take over my life right some people can write a blog article fairly quickly other times it takes a long period of time should they do it themselves should they hire someone else to write the blog article you know if they hire someone else and they're always worried it's in somebody else's voice or it's not correct or it's not you know doesn't represent them well so kind of how do you all tackle that of getting enough content and also making sure it's the right content and not making or making your full-time job job of be a blogger 

well i actually do something called a blogging power day and it's part of my five-day system absolute marketing is a system itself it's not just the name of the company and it is uh five days so first day is branding then for a day on website where we build a website from scratch in one day we create 12 months of social media posts in a day and 12 months a blog post in a day and then day five is email marketing where we do 12 months of email marketing campaigns in a day but the blogging day is day four so it's kind of towards the end there but what we actually do is we sit down we brainstorm 12 to 24 titles and then we take 10 to 15 minutes to create each blog post these do not need to be you know novels if you think you need to write more um then then a page like a word document page um then you probably have two or two blog posts or two articles that you can post so i really try to get people to keep them short sweet to the point maybe it's an opening paragraph and an ending paragraph and three bullet paragraphs so or five bullet paragraphs you know you're really trying to make sure that there's a ton of stuff in your head that you know about your business your industry um you know about your um clients the way they think what they're looking for how they react to certain things what's gonna grab their attention and so it's all in your head though and so it's just about getting that out and creating the titles first gives you that topic list so you might even go on to there's something called answer the public so it's a website and you can do free searches there and they'll actually tell you what people are searching for related to you know a specific search term so let's say i put in marketing and i'll actually be able to look up and it'll tell me what people are searching on google as it relates to marketing how to market is one of the options how to social media marketing you know so they're going to show you all those little searches and what the highest ranking ones are so if you're actually writing an article on how to use social media media marketing to improve your seo game or i don't know whatever if you're giving this title then you can actually use those topics for your titles then once you create the titles it's easy to go yeah that's a title a topic that i know about and you don't want to create titles for things that you don't really know about that you have to research you want to create titles for things that you already know about so that when you actually sit down for the 10 or 15 minutes to write something it's really easy and it's like a sentence on this two sentences on that three sentences here and then you're done you know it's i usually tell people nine sentences ten minutes is pretty much like the shortest blog post you can write so now on that because i think that's that's a good insight you know you get some people that can sit down and in 10 minutes write that type of an article you get others that are think about every word or want to go back and edit it or they want to you know they get nervous or they haven't done it before or any number of things so is it beneficial do you always recommend people write them themselves i know that there are services that you write them for you or you hire someone else or you have a you know independent or a ghostwriter those type of things are those a reasonable option do you recommend knocking not recommend or kind of a little bit of thought on that so my husband is actually a ghostwriter and he does copyright copywriting for clients and he's actually written several of my clients blog posts um as a ghostwriter and that is something where as long as the ghostwriter or the person who's doing them for you can actually write in your voice and you know sometimes they can and sometimes they can't you know when my husband does his work he'll interview the person first listen to how they talk listen to the words that they use and then he can write in their voice just from that interview it's a skill he has the talent he has um but what i found is that when people write for me then my husband has written for me before as well but when i've had other people write for me for my blog posts because i can tell you about 90 of mine are ghostwritten and nobody really knows that but they are and what i had what i did was i was actually searching for someone to write my post and i went on a forum i said this is what i'm looking for this is what i'm gonna pay and i had like 10 people respond and i said i want to see a sample of your work in this type of area they had mostly done you know sales marketing type stuff before and so i got samples of each of their work and i found someone who already naturally spoke the way that i did who naturally had that tendency to speak and use words that i would use because i could see it in their writing i write very conversationally when i do it i'm i'm very much like hey what do you think about this cool right you know like i say things like that in my blog posts and so when i found somebody that actually wrote like that and i could see all the samples only one person out of the 10 actually did that and so i was like this is the person for me and it wasn't a stretch because that was the way that that person already was writing 

no and i think that that's that's a good idea so i think you know one is is to find someone that naturally already writes in your voice and then two they should also have that tendency to be able to pick up get you know get used to your writing style understand the way you do it and then be able to remember that so now one question is is you know back to maybe the original question is is you know do you is there if you're trying to decide whether to go shroud it yourself or whether to write have somebody or write it yourself or have someone ghostwrite it for you how do you kind of make that determination or is there a right or wrong or is it financially driven or kind of is there a good right good way to figure that out or a bad way i usually go with the financial piece because if you have time to do this which if you have a day you can do it um i find that a lot of people think that like you said they worry about every word and they're worried about every sentence and is it perfect and really this is not about perfection this is about getting out information so that your clients are educated and if someone was telling you that you had to have a blog post written by tomorrow you would figure out a way to do it if it was a good opportunity if it was going to help bring you sales if it was going to give you an audience to speak to you'd be like yes i will sit down right now tonight whatever and i will make this happen even if i don't have any time i will find the time and make it happen and i think that's what we lose when we have our marketing all like spread out through the whole month and well i've got until the end of the month to do that or i can do those posts next week or you know and we keep pushing pushing pushing it and blogging is definitely one of those things that gets pushed to the very back of the list because it's not necessary right it's not necessary that we tell someone in a blog post hey this event is coming up you need to register that's an email and that usually gets sent but the blog posts get kind of pushed to the back but what i've found is that with blogging with podcasting they're very similar to me ones like the written form one's the verbal form um when you're able to do something like that on a regular basis and work ahead of yourself then you can actually use that as your daily weekly monthly marketing strategy because you're not sitting there every day creating a blog post or every week creating a blog post you can sit down for one entire day and create an entire year's worth because you you should be able to move forward with them you should say this is what i know on the subject i've written it as best as i can to the best of my ability at this time and you can push the information out when you're talking about the law or medical or something like that it requires more research it requires you to do more however most people in those fields like yourself i've worked with a lot of doctors in the past that do primary care they know it in their mind already they might have to look up a fact or two or a statute or three like they might have to just reference to say oh yeah that was five five point three two not five point three four you know that's such minor things but a lot of it is in your head already and the fact that everything is in your head in most cases is you know how to explain it then you're not trying to sit there and think about how do i say this to other lawyers so that they'll think that i'm amazing and you know i know all the fancy stuff you're thinking how do i say this to regular people who have no idea what i'm talking about and when we were able to stream of conscious speak and say this is what you need to know here are the facts and here's what you do with those facts that's it so i even encourage people if they're not you know wanting to write and they're it's hard for them to like look at a blank page and type things in either write it by hand or you can use your voice recorder and this is why i recommend podcasting to some people use your voice recorder record yourself and either make it a podcast because that's the way i kind of write in my head right or you can actually get something like descript to actually transcribe all your words you can look over that document tweak a few things make a few adjustments take out a sentence or two that was a little rambly and there you have a blog post so there's lots of different ways to get this content from your head onto paper so to speak um but there's you can do this in one day for the entire year and get it done quickly no i think that and i think that's a great idea you know because oftentimes to your point it's one of those that kind of always gets pushed back to the the back burner always you're going to get to it you never ever quite get to it because you always have something more urgent that pops up and so kind of having that let's take one day i'll write several you know it sounds like kind of you're looking at almost kind of once a month if you're doing or is that kind of the maybe that no no sorry one once you do it once a year you have an article once a month that you release is that about right correct one one or two depending you could do 12 to 24 you could do one every three weeks you know it just depends but yeah you about once a month is good and most people don't need more than that a lot of people try to do every week and it's too much and it's about thinking in like in terms of my lifestyle if it's my lifestyle and i'm a writer and i love to ride and that's my goal that's my you know my thing and i love it if i put that time in my calendar every week yeah i could get it done but that doesn't always happen and so if we think about our actual lifestyle and what's realistic yeah i can do one day a year i can pump out 12 or 24 and if i have anything that comes to mind in the rest of the year i'm not prohibited from putting more out there right the more the merrier when it comes to marketing so you know i always say if you just put out that 12 or that 24 and get it from your head into paper then you can always add more later you can always go oh i'm gonna write two every month also but have that underlying thing because things always happen life happens and we always get you know that stuff gets lost at the shuffle no i think that that is all uh certainly very valuable insight and so maybe switching gears just a little bit because i think it kind of dovetails into that the blogging aspect but you know now if you're to go to kind of branding and i'll do online branding or kind of maybe rephrase that as website design you know if you're now looking kind of so blogging is kind of one aspect of the website you know one aspect of seo is one aspect of the website now if you're looking at kind of just holistically your you know the online the platform that you use for your blogging which is oftentimes for business so put it on their website they'll have one of the tabs maybe on the the home page they'll also have an area where you can start to check out the blog but what are some of the things that they're looking at designing their and i know that's a much larger topic than we can go over right now but it's a little bit of a snippet what are some of the things they should be thinking about as they get into website design and branding and kind of creating that not just blogging and answering questions but kind of that whole look and feel 

so the brand is the most important and if you're doing any kind of marketing social media blogging anything you need to have the brand first if you don't have the brand first you're going to start seeing that you get stuck on things that things don't look right that you're not cohesive in your message so you have to start with the brand and that does include creating that color scheme that's going to be the one you use every single time you're not going to use 10 different blues 10 different greens it's going to be a green a blue a gray a cream like whatever your colors are you're going to pick them and you're going to you're going to stick to them and they have little number codes so you have to use the same number code every single time 

i recommend like putting them in a little notepad somewhere like on your computer or on your desk or even keeping them um you know memorizing them i've memorized a couple of mine that i use a lot and so that makes it so that you always can use the same color and be consistent that's super important for anything you do with marketing um and then the message too if you don't know what your message is who you are what you do and what you're sharing uh who you who you are what you do what you're sharing and who you're sharing it with right because you actually have an audience if you don't know those things about your company that's your message and if you can't carry that same message around with you all the time and only say that i had someone speak to me the other day and they said well can you do these things and can you do that and i said yeah i could but i'm not going to i'm not going to go into that field i'm not going to delve into that side of technology or marketing this is what we do and we stick to it and i've turned people away because of that but it's important to turn people away because you if you have that message my message is mostly women in business i work with some men too they they like my stuff too um but mostly women in business three to five years in business because they're at that point where they need a professional and they want some extra help they've diy'd up to that point and that they are sick of getting the marketing run around from other companies gurus that tell them things that overwhelm them and just being frustrated with all of it so that's that's my market that's my message and if i keep saying that over and over i mean i've done over 100 podcasts and i probably sound like a broken record if you listen to all of them because i say the same thing a lot so if when you have that brand and you can solidify that brand it makes everything so much easier and with the website you know yeah that's where your blog will live and that's where you know your content will live and i think it's a good landing place you know when you have someone come to your social media they get funneled over to your website they get funneled over to your blog or they get an email they should be funneled to your website it's a landing place it's got to have all the info on it um and the other places are more just little anchors that pull people in right so with the website i talk about simplicity and and usability in the way that if it's familiar people are going to use it if it's not familiar people are going to look at it and go i don't get this and they're going to go away and they never see them again and you'll never even know that they didn't get it because they didn't ever tell you that they just left your website and that was it so simplicity is really really key if you have something that you think is a complicated process or service it's probably not as complicated as you might think now one co i like the simplicity as a key and i was again that was going to be one of my questions kind of to follow up on the conversation is you know i i i whether or not i'm a good website designer and i you know i i've dabbled in it and i also now have a marketing here some marketing people on the team that have now taken it over they've you know done it x or 10 times better or whatever times better than i did you know and that was where i was really first introduced kind of as you talked about kind of the color scheme consistent colors not that i didn't have that when i originally did our website but it wasn't as consistent it wasn't as well defined and so i think that on that note you know i love to go and make fun of a lot of law firm websites in the sense that most of them i think are terrible and i just think that it's kind of just a side hobby just for fun but you know a lot of them i think you know they look pretty and they have zero functionality provide zero information they have no no way to convert and so you know as you're looking to design a website you talked a little bit about simplicity you know the temptation is is to put as much information on your website put a ton of text make it you know make sure that they get all their questions answered and you know is that a i i don't think it is but i'll let you answer maybe that we have a different opinion is that a good way to do it or should you keep a simpler website keep it cleaner do more pictures or text or kind of how do you what is that balance between providing as much information as you can to convince them and convert them over while also not overwhelming them 

well there's always one answer to that question and no one is talking about it right now so i'll be probably the first person to say it like this the answer is you devin are a consumer if you were going to hire you to do the job you do what would you look for and what would you want to know and i think we forget that we're consumers we look at it as business owners we look at it as marketers we look at it as the person building the thing right and you think i've got all this content i just was working with a client yesterday she had so much content pages and pages and pages and pages of content she's like but this isn't good information this is important they need to know this and i said why she just looked at me like what are you mad of course they need to know this and i said you've already told me that in these five sentences so why do i need a five-page document or five pages of text in a website which is just scrolling rolex scrolling to tell me the same thing that these five sentences have simply told me and her whole thing was people needed to talk to her before they could actually buy the product because it is like my product you have to talk to me before we start because it's a custom thing it's like let's look let's talk about how it works for you if it works for you and she didn't she just started looking at she was like oh my gosh and i said if you were the consumer and you were here to buy your own product would these five sentences tell you enough so that you could say that sounds pretty cool i think i think this is enough and maybe there was a couple pictures or there's a couple graphics and maybe it just it's just agreed with you as a consumer saying are you sick of this are you tired of that have you been through this well guess what we're here to fix all that oh of course now i'm ready to have a call with you like let's do it you know and so then you're open to that idea of that sales call and all of us can be honest if we get on that sales call with someone even if we're the worst marketers in the world if we can get someone to call us we're done that's it they're sold we've got them we've already we've already sold them right so i just told her that and she was looking at it going oh my gosh and i said keep that five pages of text though that is going to be important for that person you do talk to who's like i don't know i don't have all the info i'm not ready guess what i got this five page white paper for you i know you need to see the nitty gritty details i'm gonna email it to you no problem and they're gonna be like wow they knew exactly what i needed they gave me the information i needed and that five pages comes in handy later not everybody needs that for their website or their company but she had it already and so she actually could use it for a purpose so that's kind of where i look at it 

and i like that you know one of the things i look at is first of all it needs to be easy to navigate because you know too often you get so much information and you have a lot of good information and some people it's good for seo as you mentioned you have a blog article every month or a couple every month and you got to house that somewhere but you need to make it easy so that they can if they want to get to that information they can navigate to it easy if it's the people are just looking for a simple or an easy answer they're not gonna because a lot of people don't spend a ton of time it's important time but not a ton of time on the website before making a decision so you only have a limited amount of time to grab a lot of people's attention and so you've got to make it so it's simple easy to understand one last question and we could go down a lot of rabbit holes i think it'd be really fun that we'll never have time for but you know on a website and it varies i get industry by industry if it's a product definitely you want to put you know your pro or the price because if they're going to check out through your website they're going to know you want to want to know your price when you get to the service industry you get a you get a lot of mixed reviews and i have my own personal opinions and i'll i'll hold those you can always go check out our website you can probably guess where i fall but you know on the service industry a lot of times people are saying i don't want to put the prices because i have to you know i want to talk with them and basically convince them why it's worth it or why this is a cost so you almost kind of want to do that sales pitch before when you get into the service industry do you think that you should have the prices right there on their website so they can understand should you hi you know hide the ball a bit more until you get a chance to talk to them or any thoughts or opinions on that one 

yes i do have the opinion on that um i actually have my website prices they're right there the prices are right there um i have multiple different options when it comes to that we only sell one thing we sell the five-day system you can buy five days you can buy three days you can buy one day um but we do it done for you done with you or we can coach you on it still the five-day system still the same five pieces but there's different ways of accessing that information 

right so that's where my thing comes into my confusion and i've always struggled with this and this is just like the age-old question of how much do you put on it where do you put all that info and all that stuff um and so i use trouble struggle with it myself because when you're the person doing it for yourself it's so much harder i can look at someone else's and go yep this is the way to do it no problem but when i look at my own it's much harder right because we look at our own stuff we just get all flustered and confused and go well maybe this is right maybe that's right but as far as pricing for other people 

you know for this company that i worked with yesterday for example they have a sas product that includes training and that is huge because that's not usually included with sas products and so their pricing is going to be much higher than if you were to just buy the sas product and just use the product but because they include the training and it's not just about the product it's about um you know the type of program that they're running and about more than just you know here's here's a system to use um it's going to actually train people on how to do their jobs better and so of course it's going to be more but larger companies and mid-sized companies are going to go that's what i need i don't want to hire a person in-house i want this these people to train my people to show them the products and then we use their products because it makes more sense so then i want to say let's have that conversation we might say starting at um you know this many this much per license and then you can kind of decide how many licenses but you might not know what that means do i need five do i need three do i need seven um don't need 55 and so then you would say i would say like you know we do it price per license or something like that and we would just have that call because you're gonna have to have that conversation of all those nitty-gritty questions come out and you can actually answer those questions and then say okay well for you you need 50 licenses we're going to throw in an extra five because we want you to grow your team or whatever like there's things that you can do with that and i think so those kind of ones i try not to put the price on when you really have to have those conversations with mine i want people to know it's a service i want you to know how much you're getting in for right now does that mean you shouldn't call me but i want to know that you know that this is the number i'm going to tell you is there payment plans available yeah are there discounts available at certain times of the year sure you know but it doesn't mean that i'm trying to turn away people necessarily but it also means hey this is what it's worth to me for me to sell this to you and i want you to know that up front so it really does depend on the business 

no but i'm and in that was that's where i'm at you know one of the frustrations in the legal indus especially in the legal industry is everybody tries to you most i would say most websites not all because there are a few most of them you go you have no idea how much they're going to charge you know and they're going to say well we're on an hourly rate and everything it depends and i think that first of all that's a little bit of a cop-out a lot of legal services you can at least for a good amount of them offer flat fees or otherwise give them a price range as to what they're looking at and you don't you know and it may go over and you get attorneys especially that are so nervous that if i tell them one price or put it on the website they're going to stick to it and then if they want me to do more then i get all of that i think it's dealt with but i think the biggest frustration for when i go on a website is like i don't know how much this is going to cost i don't know if they're super expensive and then not only that then then when you get on the call you can spend a whole bunch of time on a call selling them all and they usually wait till the end and then they'll tell you the price and then you they'll say oh i can't afford that and now you've wasted a whole bunch of your time on a call with them i don't know wasted but you haven't they're not going to convert over to a client and so in that sense it's wasted and if you just told them that upfront or they could see then they can a bit understand if you're even within their realm within what they can afford and within their budget and it makes it a lot easier process a lot less frustration 

i think a lot more um uh a lot bet more beneficial and i think that you know that's where everybody's moving is they they want everything even services tend to be starting to become a commodity everybody wants to know what it is they want it to be a flat fee they don't want it to be hourly they don't want it to be an open check they want to understand what they're committing so i'm right there with you and i but i figured i would hold my my opinions and see what you said first well i like the company from yesterday too like they um you know they they don't put those prices on there but their messaging their branding is going to those people that they know can afford the price they're gonna say and they don't necessarily need to know the price because of the positions they're in and the the need they have for this product this service so there isn't really a discussion of it's kind of almost whatever it costs will buy because they know they're always going to be within that price range and that's why they don't do that so there's that one little caveat of if you can go to that high ticket person and be like guess what you don't know that it's ten thousand dollars but you know that you could afford ten thousand dollars because you're speaking to that market already it's when you get into that mid-range size to lower end side like where i'm at you know and just the small businesses and the entrepreneurs and people like that that's when you have to say guess what this is the price we are up front with each other but when you get into that higher tiered stuff you can get away with the no pricing and it's not really as big a deal 

no i think that and i think that's great advice so we're running short on time and there's always so many things i wish we could dive into i always find when it's you know it's a fun topic and there's never enough time to dive into them so with that you know if people want to reach out to you they want to find out more they want to be a client a customer they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you connect up with you and find out more 

you can go to getabsolutemarketing.com we have a free membership with tons of resources and also you can get my pro toolkit there all my ebooks and all that kind of stuff get my get absolute marketing.com 

all right well i definitely encourage everybody to check out the website find out more and uh make sure to get a plan i love the idea of having kind of the five five day course you can go through get everything planned out for a year and have that you know kind of one and done not that there may be other things that aren't uh adding on to that but i like that kind of that package idea well if you are as we wrap up if you're a listener and you have your own journey to tell or you're an expert in the field that would be a great uh great you'd love to share feel free to go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on our podcast also if you're a listener make sure to one click subscribe so you know when all of our awesome episodes come out and two if you uh if you can leave us a review so new people can find us that would be great as well last but not least if you ever need help with your patents trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to reach out to us at miller iplaw we're always here to help just go to strategymeeting.com thank you again elizabeth for coming on the podcast it's been a pleasure and i wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last 

thank you so much it's great talking to [Music] you