Len Markidan: The Value Of Being Valuable

Transcript

[0:00:17] CH: What’s up, everybody? It’s Charlie Hoehn, the host of Author Hour where I interview authors about their new books. Today’s episode is with Len Markidan. He’s the author of The Value Of Being Valuable. Len is a content marketing strategist and he’s the chief marketing officer at Podia. He spent the last 15 years as sort of the brains behind really successful content marketing strategies, he’s worked with a huge range of clients, everybody from Fortune 500 to even Fortune 50 companies like Prudential, he’s worked with Jet.com, Groove, Cheg, Groupon, Health Line. That’s what this episode is about is what Len has learned about creating meaningful content that wins over customers for life. The reason this is so valuable is because if you’re a company and you’ve been doing content marketing wrong, you’ve probably just dismissed it as it’s a passing trend or it just doesn’t work for us. The truth is that content marketing is one of the most effective ways to build a profitable, long lasting relationship with your customers. Content marketing is not going anywhere, it’s been around forever and will continue to be around for a long time and Len shares a great story about Johnson & Johnson in this episode where he talks about how content marketing literally saved the company from going out of business and catapulted them into the stratosphere and made them a huge success. By the end of this episode, you’ll know exactly why some of your content marketing hasn’t worked and you’ll know more importantly how to fix it and take your business to the next level. Now, here’s our conversation with Len Markidan.

[0:02:26] Len Markidan: I was running marketing for a company called Groove. We were a software company in 2008 and we were looking around us and everybody seemed to be succeeding with content marketing. Everybody seemed to be putting out blogs and doing super well in building these successful businesses on the backs of these blogs and we were a really young startup, we had very few customers and we had to be scrappy because we had very little money and in fact, when we looked at the burn rate of the money that we had in the back, we were going to run out of cash, probably in four to six months. We saw these companies succeeding with blogging and we thought hey, we should get in on this, this is the meal ticket right here. We put our heads down, wrote a bunch of blog articles, posted them to Tumblr at the time and launched a crickets. The crickets remained, I mean, week one, week two, week three, we published more articles because we thought it would get us more traffic, week four, week five, publish more articles because we thought it would get us more traffic and this entire time, we were getting closer and closer to that out of cash date. Nothing seemed to be happening, we weren’t getting customers, we weren’t getting people reading the content, we weren’t getting any traction at all, nothing that we had hoped for, none of this kind of promise land opportunity that it looks like, when you look out into the world of these successful software companies building big businesses off of content, not just software companies, all kinds of companies. We took back and thought, “Clearly, this isn’t working but why does it feel like we’re spinning our wheels, why does it seem like everybody else is succeeding” and we couldn’t really come up with an answer because on the surface, it looked pretty similar. We were writing blog content that didn’t look all that dissimilar from the other blog content that we were seeing out there. We decided to dig a little bit deeper and we started reaching out to people behind those successful blogs that we were looking at and we were reaching out to the chief marketing officer at Hub Spot and the CEO at Un bounce and Kiss Metrics. All of these software companies, Mailchimp, all these software companies at the time that were doing super well with content marketing. We would ask them questions like “Hey, what are you doing that you think is different from what we’re doing, take a look at their blog, What are we not doing? What is it that you feel the secret’s responsible for your success." What was interesting was that people were really willing to talk. We were emailing these super busy, super accomplished people and they saw that we were putting in the effort. I think a lot of them, you know, to an extent took pity on us but they were willing to talk, they saw that we were trying really hard, it wasn’t like we were emailing out of the blue and saying “Hey, I’m thinking about starting content marketing.” You know, “what are the top 40 things I should do,” which is what a lot of the emails, they get probably look like but we were actually showing that we were committed to this and people were very willing to get on the phone and talk and give us feedback and what we learned in that process was that 95% of success in content marketing was beneath the surface, it was – What we couldn’t see. We were looking and what we were seeing was certain kind of article, certain kind of content and we would just copying that part, we were copying the 5% butt we were missing the 95% below the surface that was actually responsible for this company’s success. That led us to essentially take the blog down because we’ve been doing it wrong this whole time. Put our heads down for another four weeks, relaunch it entirely and we actually ended up launching a blog that within 24 hours had, II think a thousand subscribers. Within a week, we had 5,000 subscribers and you know, to t h is day, groove, the blog is the number one driver of new customers for the business, the company is a multimillion dollar month company and it is all being driven by content marketing and all of it was from this realizing that we were just completely failing and spinning our wheels and trying to dig in and see what people were doing that we didn’t know. That’s really why I ended up writing the book was because more and more people that I spoke with were also not realizing that 95% of the work is what you can’t see.

[0:06:54] CH: Wow. You know what’s crazy about that story Len? Here’s what struck me. I’ve talked to so many authors about their books at this point and I have never heard an author tell this story and yet I have seen this so many times. It is so common and I’m almost stunned that more authors have not brought this up because it’s true, it’s like, on the surface, it’s easy to emulate what is another successful blog does but you don’t know what actually went in to that, that made it work. I kind of know what you're talking about but explain for the people listening at home, give an example of something that you thought was working but it was only because you saw the tip of the ice berg and copied that and had no idea like the roots of what was working?

[0:07:53] Len Markidan: Sure, that’s a great question. I’ll give you one example, one of our earliest articles was 10 Reasons You Should Sign up for Groove and you know, anybody who has been in content marketing for any amount of time and seen this kind of thing play itself out would look at that and kind of laugh because it’s terrible. It’s just nobody cares. Exactly, nobody cares. That’s exactly right Charlie, what you just said is exactly why it was wrong, right? It’s because it was all about us and what we learned was the level of research and the depth that these businesses and content teams would go to really understand their audience, to really understand their readers, to understand their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their problems and not just what the problems were but how the readers actually talked about those problems, the specific words that they used. The amount of research that went into that and the amount of time that was spent on that was just mind-blowing to us because we weren’t doing any of it.

[0:09:05] CH: Wow, I think of the example of Ryan Levesque. He comes to mind as somebody who falls into the description you gave. He wrote a book called ask and in that book, he kind of lays out like he will survey his entire audience and fixate specifically on just the people who wrote the longest responses because they’re the most engaged and then he’ll use their wording and all the stuff. You read through somebody’s process like that and you’re like, my gosh, I’ve just been mailing it in and I’ve just been doing things on a whim. What kind of changes did you make after you talked with all those people?

[0:09:49] Len Markidan: Well, I think the most profound change that we made was Groove was a customer support software company. We sold software that lets you answer customer support tickets and chats and social media post and support teams would use it. But typically it would be at the time a solopreneur businesses or three person or five person or even eight or 10 person businesses. A lot of our content early on was very customer support focused. As we started to survey our audience, as we started to have conversations with our audience. I mean, we would do, I think we did like 300 phone calls and those first six months and tried to understand what their problems were and what the biggest thorns in their side were that we could solve with content. We found out that we actually weren’t hearing a lot about support. The businesses in our market actually weren’t spending that much time thinking about support. When we ask CEO’s who are the ones buying our software, what they were worried about, it was almost always sales, marketing, growth, hiring, operations, you know, things that really had nothing at all to do with customer support and we thought, you know what’s really interesting about that is that those are exactly the same problems that we’re dealing with. We’re also not really thinking about support, we’re a six person company, we don’t even have the luxury to have this be a problem for us. Why would we care about reading 19 customer support tips yet? What came out of that, people clearly struggled with all these things, all of these business related entrepreneurship related problems and yet, we haven’t really found a great business blog that covers all of this. That covers all of it in, from a perspective of an entrepreneur who is learning about these things as they go along. That’s what we decided to launch, we decided to launch a start, the blog was called A Startup’s Journey from Zero To a Hundred K In Monthly Revenue. We decided to document.

[0:11:55] CH: That’s a great name by the way.

[0:11:57] Len Markidan: The wins in the past. Thank you very much, yes, we decided to document everything. The wins, the losses, and actually the call to action in the subscription box was, “from aha to oh shit, we’re sharing everything we learn on our journey to a hundred K, we’re learning a lot and so will you.”

[0:12:16] CH: Dude, I think I signed up for that newsletter, I didn’t know you were behind that. I thought I remember coming across that and thought, that was such a great tag line, really good.

[0:12:29] Len Markidan: That’s awesome, I’m so happy to hear that we got you in there too.

[0:12:30] CH: You got me.

[0:12:32] Len Markidan: We got you. Well, we got you and hopefully delivered something of value but the reality was, the content that we were producing before just wasn’t relevant. It just wasn’t something that was relevant to the people that were buying our products. We launched this thing and what we saw very quickly was people were really responding well to it, it was resonating with them, they thought, they would leave comments like I can’t believe that there’s no other blog like this, I can’t believe I’ve never – I can’t believe I’m just stumbling on this now and you know what’s funny was that we would hear things like that, I can’t believe I’m just finding this now and it was like our seventh post is like you know, three weeks after we launched and I mean, I think the blog probably has 3,000 articles on it now but we certainly became optimistic after hearing that first wave of feedback.

[0:13:26] CH: You know what’s amazing about this is the lesson that I’ve painfully had to revisit numerous times, which is stop doing what you think people want and actually do what they want.

[0:13:39] Len Markidan: Yes.

[0:13:41] CH: You guys were a perfect example of on the surface, it totally seems like yes, having a customer support company that focuses on that and is marketing themselves, sure, on the surface, any beginning content marketer would think that would absolutely work. You invested 300 phone calls of education about your customers. You found out what they really wanted.

[0:14:11] Len Markidan: Yeah, I mean, it’s actually – you know, it was astonishing to us at the time just how off the mark we were when we started having these conversations and I hear all the time, I mean, I consulted for a while after that and you know, got the chance to speak with probably a hundred pus companies that were trying to get their content operations off the ground and it’s astonishing how much people realize, how wrong they’ve been in the first 48 hours of customer interviews and just in the first couple of days of changing their content strategy from let’s project what we want on to our audience to let’s figure out what our audience wants and deliver that one.

[0:14:57] CH: Yeah, what’s the line? People will buy what you're selling when you start selling what people are buying sort of –

[0:15:07] Len Markidan: Yes, exactly.

[0:15:09] CH: I want to talk about, what are the cost of getting this wrong? I mean, obviously, your company was literally on the verge of shutting down but you consult for all these big companies, what are the cost of getting this wrong? Even a little bit?

[0:15:25] Len Markidan: Well, I mean, they can vary from pretty bad to the greatest cost of all, which is the company just dies, which is what we were endanger of. I mean, if we didn’t get this right, we had no money to invest in other channels, we had nothing. I had no other options at this point. If we got it wrong, there would be no Groove now. There are a lot of companies though that have built in audiences that have a little bit more security that started doing content marketing. The problem and the risk of doing it wrong and there’s a lot of different ways to do it wrong. You lose trust. You don’t really get very many second or third chances with your audience and so when you start putting out content that your audience uses, you know, tone deaf or useless or you know, you can use a lot of extreme words to describe it but really, the very worst one is boring. If people think that your content is boring, you’re not going to get a second look. It’s really worth it to try and do it right.

[0:16:25] CH: Yeah, that I feel is weirdly the biggest danger zone is these companies who do have a bit of security who are like okay, we know we need to do content marketing, we know we need to have something there but just kind of mail it in, but don’t put in the effort to really learn what their customers and clients actually value and want and will be excited to read and share. Because the, it’s just fluff, it’s like a book that you immediately put down because there’s nothing in it of value and you’re like, what is the point of even having this there? It’s not just trust, it alters your customer’s perception of your brand. What are they doing? They’re out of touch.

[0:17:18] Len Markidan: yeah, they’re out of touch, they don’t reflect my values, they don’t even know what I care about, they don’t know who I am and you know. It’s interesting because it seems so low risk, it seemed like –

[0:17:33] CH: That’s the danger.

[0:17:33] Len Markidan: Getting it wrong. You know, yeah, that’s the danger. Because there is at the very basic level, there’s a very low barrier to entry to do content marketing, right? You need a blog, I think you need to write and publish it. You’re doing content marketing, right? If you do it badly, you know, you didn’t really invest much time into it and you didn’t lose much. Whereas if you’re a company, if your company decides to but a super bowl ad, you’re going to spend 30 million bucks on it. You’re going to make damn well sure that every T is crossed and every eye is dotted and that thing is perfect. For these low barrier to entry channels, it’s so much easier to just phone it in and then what happens very often is people will phone it in, they will put together some half assed blog post or they’ll go out and they’ll hire a content farm to write some generic commodity content for them. They’ll publish it on their blog and nothing will happen and they’ll say, content marketing is not a good channel for us. This is just not a channel that’s going to work for us.

[0:18:40] CH: Which is ridiculous. It’s kind of sad in a lot of ways but it just happens very often. Yeah, it’s the truth. You know, doing it right is both an art and a science and you can go about it in a systematic way but I’d imagine, a lot of people listening are like man, “I’ve tried content marketing in the past, I’ve had such mixed results, we had like one or two that did pretty well. I don’t understand what we did necessarily well. I don’t know the factors that made that succeed and that one fail.” Let’s talk about how do you create content that really connects with your audience?

[0:19:25] Len Markidan: Yeah, the T is a tired cliché, that is the million dollar question and it really doesn’t start where you know, as we learned, it doesn’t start where we thought it started, which is you know, when you put paper to pen or when you put fingers to keyboard and start tippling in to WordPress. It really starts with conversations with your customers, it starts with figuring out what their problems are, what their challenges are, you know, your product, whatever it is that you're selling, your product, your service, that’s going to be a really powerful solution for them, it’s going to be a really powerful product for them to purchase and it’s going to change their lives but it’s not going to solve every problem for them, right? They probably have a lot of different tangential problems that if you can help them solve with content, you’re going to get that built in trust, you’re going to get that relationship with that customer so that when they’re ready to buy your product or service and they’re looking at you and they’re looking at a fewer competitors, you’re just the no brainier choice, right? Figuring out what those problems are, asking questions like, “Hey, what is it that you’re struggling with today, just curious, what would you say the biggest thorn in your side is right now?" Then digging deeper and saying, “Okay, that’s interesting.” “Processing expenses for your team, can you tell me a little bit more about that? What do you find challenging about that, what do you think was different?” Taking that feedback, taking those responses and testing out some content, turning those into content pieces that attempt to solve those problems and I’m using content pieces as kind of a universal term but I mean, blog articles or YouTube videos or you know, videos of any sort or infographics or whatever it is that your strength is, just play to it, a lot of people ask what the best channel, the best medium is.

[0:21:16] CH: The one that you’re good at.

[0:21:17] Len Markidan: Yeah, exactly. Just do the one that you're good at and this is what Michael Jordan learned when he tried to do baseball. Just do the thing that you’re really good at and it will work out so much better for you. It’s trying to solve those problems and then getting feedback as rapidly as possible and just iterating until you start actually getting feedback that says, man, that was actually really helpful, thank you.

[0:21:46] CH: That’s really good and it is the upfront work. It is similar to like if you were going to build a house, you wouldn’t just immediately run to Home Depot and be like, “Okay, I’m going to grab some wood and then I’m just going to take it over to the site” like no. You would sit down and map out, “Okay this is the design I am thinking of and you would get experts aka your customers in on that process to prevent you from making something that was completely useless. And I feel like this is setting the blueprint and getting a team, again your customers involved so that it’s actually useful and if it is useful to one or more of them, it is bound to be useful to a ton of them.

[0:22:32] Len Markidan: 100% and I absolutely understand the temptation, the seduction of wanting to go to Home Depot and just start by buying the fanciest grill they have, right? And just getting the fanciest gadgets, the fanciest toys and you now the content equivalent of that is I want to start by picking some really, really powerful CMS, really, really blogging software. I want to invest some money in Facebook ads to use –

[0:23:02] CH: I mean I see this all the time with people doing podcasts or videos like, “What gear do I need?” What are the best bits to do this basic thing of getting your message out into the world and it’s so intoxicating and so alluring to get caught up in what is the best piece of technology. The truth is, is like there are literally zero pieces of technology that can make bad content good or bad content succeed. So you are teaching how do you make content.

[0:23:36] Len Markidan: Totally. Absolutely, yeah it is like, “Which podcast microphone is going to help me break into the top 10?” When you put it into terms that are relatable to the person asking the question, it is easy for us to see how ridiculous it is but when you are asking about something, you don’t really understand I think it was Stephen King who said something like the most common question he gets is what pen he writes with. And when he goes to his author and talks to them, the most common thing people ask is what pen do you write with and it’s just so funny when you look at Stephen King’s story and look at interviews with Stephen King and this guy has been writing prolifically for I don’t know how many years now and every single day, he does not take a day off and he just writes all day every day. It is not the pen, right? It is the work that you put in up front and it is the same thing with content marketing. Yeah, it is the reps, exactly.

[0:24:30] CH: Yeah, man I could go on a long time about this particular part alone. I see the same symptom of asking what’s your morning routine like dude –

[0:24:43] Len Markidan: Right, what do you eat for breakfast.

[0:24:45] CH: Right. It does not matter, you are getting lost in the details. It doesn’t matter at all so.

[0:24:52] Len Markidan: Yeah, do you drink your matcha before you meditate or after?

[0:24:56] CH: Right, who cares? Okay, so once you have created – I know this is crazy to skim over because this is arguably the most important and again, this is why anybody listening ought to pick up a copy of The Value Of Being Valuable on Amazon. The title I love because it is funny you hear people say like just deliver value. Just deliver value and it’s like how? I have asked that numerous times like how do you deliver value and not everybody can explain it very well. And I think this might actually be the first time I have seen a book address it head on of this is how you create value. Here is how you create content that connects with your audience and here is how they’ll end up working with you because of that content. So it is really cool and getting your message to the people you want to reach, is there anything you want to touch on here? I know we touched on like the tools don’t matter but platforms that you choose do matter because you want to reach people where they are.

[0:26:05] Len Markidan: Absolutely and this is something that also highlights how important that research part of that is, that conversation with your audience really is because there are so many businesses that are writing content that is great. Their content is really, really good and if you are listening to this, you might have content that is really, really, really good and you are wondering why it’s not working and there’s a very good chance that it’s just because it is not getting in front of the right people. And if you do that upfront work of doing the research and you’re asking questions like you know, “Hey, what blogs do you read? What Facebook groups are you a member of? What Slack channels do you participate in? What websites do you visit? What sub Reddits do you frequent at? What are you subscribed to?” just doing that work and figuring out where your audience hangs out online can save you massive headache and heartache down the line. Because again, this isn’t one of those things where there are a lot of great shortcuts. This is why I am probably not going to sell as many copies as the secret but the only real way to get that message to your audience is to do the work and so finding out the communities where they’re spending time online, going into those communities, joining those communities, being a part of them, providing value, answering questions, contributing to those communities, just as a community member would. And eventually, you build up a grounds full of people that know who you are that know what you do, that find your website, share your content and then other people who know people like the people your content is for, that is a lot of people, will end up stumbling on your content as well and so, you can’t understate how important it is to actually do the work on the promotion side of things and get it in front of the people that need to be reading your content. That was something that we probably spent 80% of the time on. If we spend 20% of the time researching and writing content, we probably spend 80% of the time going out, finding people who are influential in the circles where our audience hangs out, getting their feedback on content, getting them bought into our story, bought into our mission to share this stuff to the world and getting them to share it with their community. So we ended up building a small army of people who every time we publish an article, we are thrilled to share it with the world because we have invested them in the process.

[0:28:32] CH: Yeah, they say content is king. You always hear content is king but distribution is really queen. It is equally important and arguably, I mean if we are extending a chest metaphor, much more important than the king in many ways or more powerful I should say. If you are on the right platform in front of the people that you’re really trying to reach and they’re eagerly awaiting that type of content, it explodes in such a way that you didn’t even know was possible. And going back to your earlier results of within the first week, you guys had a thousand subscribers and a few weeks later, you had 5,000, what was it during that initial time that you really attribute to that quick success. I mean was it the fact that you’ve finally found out like you had a great title, right? A startup journey from zero to a 100K in monthly revenue, that is a great title that an audience is clearly hungry for that specific content but what were you doing distribution wise to get your message out?

[0:29:44] Len Markidan: That’s a great question. So we had a list of about 150 people before we launched this blog. We went out and we put together a list of a 150 people who we thought essentially held the keys to our audience. These were bloggers, other entrepreneurs, people who are influential on social media or Twitter or LinkedIn at the time and we began to reach out to every single one of these people one on one. This is not something that – This wasn’t like an automated CRM thing. We emailed every single one individually with a personal email and we said, “Hey we are getting ready to launch this blog. We have a draft with the first article, here is what we are trying to do with it. We’d love to get your feedback, would you mind just taking a peak at it and letting us know what you think?” and we weren’t doing this in a sneaky or backhanded way. We genuinely wanted the feedback because we wanted to create things that were actually going to be valuable for people because that is the only way long term to build a successful content operation as we had learned and to our surprise again, I don’t know why we kept getting surprised by this but to our surprise again, people were more than willing to help and people would reply and they say, “Yeah, sure. I would love to take a look.” They would give us feedback, we probably got feedback from 50 or 60 people in that first round and we did actually end up changing our first launch article based on that and we published the article and on day one, we were then able to email back 60 people and we emailed all 150 again but we were able to email 60 people who have all taken part in writing this piece of content, who all felt some level of ownership for this piece of content because they had helped us write it. And said, “Hey, we just share this. We would really appreciate your support, would you mind sharing this with your audience?” and right away, I think our site broke three times that day. We had people like I think our very first article we had like Gary V. commented on it and we have all of these people that we had built relationships over for the last – not very long, it was six weeks but we did a lot of work to get them and right away, all of these people were validating this content. They were sharing this content with their audience and you know that quickly, we had a thousand subscribers but it wasn’t because of anything we necessarily – it was again, it was probably 5% because of what we did in the 24 hours after we launched the article and 95% of what we did in the six weeks prior.

[0:32:14] CH: That’s great and right there, I mean you share the secret to what a lot of really successful content agencies do. They really take the time to craft something that’s new, that’s fresh that’s worth seeing, that is worth sharing, that is worth engaging with but then, they don’t stop there. They go and develop these relationships with people who it will be relevant for, they get them involved in some level and so they’re mentally committed to seeing that thing succeed. And then they come back and say, “Hey would you want to share it with your audience?” and that is the model and it works really well and I think a lot of companies likely don’t do it because it’s work, because it takes planning. It really takes consistent effort. I mean you can go and publish a blog post and get it up within the hour or you can take this six week approach probably longer even if you are talking to a lot of customers beforehand and really do it right. And I guess The Value Of Being Valuable is so good because it’s the hard stuff that people aren’t willing to do but if you do-do it, it pays off beyond your wildest dreams.

[0:33:44] Len Markidan: Yeah and I love that you pointed out that this is the model because it just works and it has always worked and it will continue to work if you execute against it properly. I mean people think of content marketing as something new. People think of content marketing as something that HubSpot invented or some web 1.0 company invented but the reality is, content marketing has been around forever. I mean I tell the story in the book of those in the 1880s. That the Johnson Brothers starting a company, they are calling it Johnson & Johnson because they were incredibly clever and they were originally selling gauze and it was an antiseptic gauze for use in operating rooms to keep patients from getting infections after surgeries and what they were finding was nobody was buying the gauze because surgeons didn’t actually believe that there was bacteria in there. It wasn’t widely accepted at the time that this was an actual risk to patients. It wasn’t something that the medical community rallied around and so what the company ended up doing was they created what was probably one of the most impressive pieces of content marketing in history where they went out and they found this guy, Joseph Lister in the UK who was studying bacteria and how it can infect open wounds and how when doctors wash their hands or disinfected their hands, patients had better outcomes and when gauze was used, patients had better outcomes. And they asked him if he would be the lead author on a book that they then went and got quotes from 53 of the leading surgeons at the time supporting this theory that this is the future of medicine. That being mindful of bacteria, being mindful of infection and preventing infection is the future of surgical medicine and what ended up happening was they published the book and this company went from being close to bankrupt to selling 3 million yards of gauze a year. And obviously now, they’re mega massive goliath company but who do you think originally promoted that content? It was Joseph Lister and the 53 people that they interviewed.

[0:35:58] CH: Yeah, that is a phenomenal anecdote. I love that and like you said, this is how human beings operate and I’ve personally witnessed it among some of the top content creators and now you, who you’ve worked with I mean Fortune 50 companies and I mean you have worked with companies like Prudential and Jet.com, I mean you’ve helped them do this kind of stuff and you have seen the successes that they’ve had. Can you share maybe a case study, something that you are most proud of in working with your clients and helping them with this stuff?

[0:36:39] Len Markidan: Yeah, definitely. I mean to be completely honest the best part of every single client engagement that goes well is exactly the same and it is that first 48 hours of customer research. I mean the companies that you have mentioned for example, we have sat in the room after the first customer interviews were conducted and we have read the transcripts and we look at customer responses side by side with the company’s existing content. And when the content teams and the marketing teams see the disconnect between the content they’re publishing and what their audience actually cares about and wants, it’s incredible because there’s this transformation that takes place when they realize that the reason that they’re not being as successful with their content as they like it’s not because their content is bad. It’s not because their content team is bad. It is not because they’re necessarily not promoting it the right ways. And they are spinning their wheels, they are not spending enough on advertising. It is just because they are missing the mark and it doesn’t take very much to – if you have already got that momentum, it doesn’t take very much to do the work required to start hitting the mark and to start actually producing content that will resonate with your audience and so I think it’s every time I see that transition from “I don’t know why this isn’t working” to “Oh wow, I not realize exactly why this isn’t working” to “Hey, I can’t believe that is all that took to change things.”

[0:38:05] CH: Man this is super powerful. For anybody who does content marketing, any company, any individual, you need to get the book. It is The Value Of Being Valuable. Len, I’ve got a couple more questions for you then we’ll let you go but this has been phenomenal and I am saying this from a place of I get paid to do content marketing, right? I make a living doing content marketing and have for quite a while and yeah, I am fully behind this book 100%. So again it is The Value Of Being Valuable. The first question I have is let’s say somebody is listening to this and they’re like, “I want to work with Len” or “I want to follow what he is doing” what is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow you?

[0:38:51] Len Markidan: Sure and first of all, I am trying to say thank you for the kind words. It really does mean a lot coming from you and you’re an OG blogger, I mean you have content creation and content marketing forever and one of the first folks I followed so thank you very much for that.

[0:39:05] CH: Thank you.

[0:39:05] Len Markidan: Yeah and so the best way to find me is I actually spend a lot of the little free time I have rambling on Twitter. So you could find me there, twitter.com/lenmarkidan or you can go to my site, lenmarkidan.com. I send out an email every Friday with whatever is on my mind, content marketing related or not and some folks find it useful and so maybe you will too.

[0:39:27] CH: Excellent and the final question I have for you is to give our listeners a challenge. What is the one thing that they can do this week that’s from your book that will have a positive impact?

[0:39:40] Len Markidan: So it is going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people because we are not used to doing this and it was really uncomfortable for me the first time I did this but get a customer on the phone and even better, get them on a video chat and even better, get them in person and ask them what their challenges are, ask them what they are struggling with and if they start to ham and yawn say, “Yeah, yeah there’s nothing really that comes to mind right now” push them on it. And try to really understand what the thorns in their side are that you can help them with, with your content. It is something that is really, really hard to do the first time for a lot of people. If you are not naturally inclined to talking on the phone all day with your customers, I mean this isn’t hard for sales folks but for a lot of my clients, this is a really, really challenging. It is hard to do but it gets addictive. I promise you, you will absolutely fall in love with it when you start seeing the results.

[0:40:34] CH: I love that and I normally don’t do this but I want to extend that challenge a little bit, how often should they be talking to customers? I mean what is a good rhythm for them to get into?

[0:40:46] Len Markidan: Sure, so at the company where I run marketing right now is called Podia and we do a – so I do at least two customer calls a week personally and we do a large scale customer study where we get on the phone with 40 customers and send out a survey to everybody else, we do that twice a year. So I would say just try to get to the habit of doing it every week even if it is just a little bit and then try to go really, really deep on it at least once or twice a year. Because what you’ll find is that the pulse of your customers change. People needs change, people’s demand change and really, your customers change too.

[0:41:18] CH: So good. I am actually writing that down right now because I want to get into it. That is such a healthy business habit. It is so good. So, the book is The Value Of Being Valuable. It is on Amazon. Len Markidan, thank you so much for being on the show.

[0:41:34] Len Markidan: Thank you, Charlie. It was a pleasure. I really appreciate you having me.

[0:41:38] CH: Thanks again to Len Markidan for being on the show. You can buy his book, The Value Of Being Valuable, on Amazon. Be sure to check out authorhour.co for show notes and a transcript of this episode. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to today’s show. If you liked what you heard, here is what I want you to do next: open up the podcast app on your phone or iTunes on your computer and search for “Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn” and then click “ratings and reviews”. Take 10 seconds to rate this show or leave a review. It is a small favor but it’s really the best way to show your support and give me feedback and if you know someone else who’d love Author Hour, take another three seconds to text them a link to this episode. We’ll see you next time.