Building intentional momentum through content, with James Scherer

John Tyreman:  Hi, gang. Welcome to Episode 46, of the Digital Marketing Troop Podcast where we interview marketing leaders and practitioners about strategies and tactics that you can put to work right away. I’m your host, John Tyreman. And I am joined today by James Scherer, VP of Growth at Codeless, a content agency that produces hundreds of articles each month for the most competitive spaces on the internet. And we’re here to talk about a pillar and post content strategy. James, thank you so much for coming on our show. How are you doing today?

James Scherer:  Doing really well. Thank you very much for having me, John. I’m looking forward to this.

John Tyreman:  Absolutely. Yeah. And before we dive into our topic, I’m curious. I was looking at your bio. And I’m really curious, what brought you to the United Kingdom over from Vancouver?

James Scherer:  A woman. Standard. My wife’s British. So we met in university and then kind of when Vancouver – when we got priced out of Vancouver, we moved over here to something more, more attainable. Got a little house. Yeah.

John Tyreman:  Oh, I love love. That’s a great story. Cool. Well, James, let’s talk about your pillar and post content strategy approach. Can you give our listeners a high-level overview of what that is?

James Scherer:  Sure. So the idea behind the pillar and post method is that you create, I guess, first and foremost, you identify categories of content that you want to kind of be known for and be seen for on search. Then within each category, you identify pillars, which are kind of your pie in the sky search terms, that high volume, probably competitive, your most important searches that you want to be found for. You create content for those, you know, oriented towards those searchers, first and foremost, get it indexed, get it live. And then you support that content with 15 to 20, kind of support articles within each category. So the idea, I guess, if we’re talking about three to five categories of content, three to five pillars per category, 15, to 20 supporting pieces of content for each category for each kind of, for those pillars. Very quickly, we have 100 topics that we can do in any given year, which is a good amount of volume to kind of get you well and truly on your way towards content success. The idea behind it is that the support content, if you’re just getting out and getting started, content marketing is a lot about building momentum. It’s about building domain authority and domain ranking. But it’s also just about, let’s rank some content, because the internal links from your ranking content are going to drive momentum and build traffic and be more valuable from a link perspective, than no one ranking. So you create supporting content that happens to rank or that ranks reasonably quickly. Because it’s, you know, not attacking the massively competitive search terms. Even if it’s low volume, it’s not attacking the massively competitive search terms. So you start ranking in the first and second page. And when those articles start ranking, then they, by their support to the pillar pieces, increase those pillar pieces’ chance to rank. So it’s basically just about building content and playing with intention. What are the categories I’m identifying? What are the pillars within those categories? And what is the support content? And how much can I publish in any given month to kind of reliably build a content strategy that, for us, within our content agency, we’ve seen work really well, from zero, like from nothing at all, building momentum through this strategy to drive significant traffic after about a year. It’s significant, like 50,000 plus from zero within a year.

John Tyreman:  How do you balance quality in quantity? Like when you outsource content, right, there’s a risk that some content producers, maybe they don’t know your business or they don’t know your audience? And maybe this is a question for how Codeless has addressed this challenge, like how do you balance that quantity versus quality?

James Scherer:  First and foremost, everything that we do, which I think is easily transferable to in house, is about creation of comprehensive processes for content production. So we use software a lot. We use, you know, tools like Phrase, Clearscope, MarketMuse, SEO Surfer. Those are AI kind of oriented or SEO oriented software that takes the written content that your freelancer or your in house writers put together and compares it to the competition and gives you a score, essentially. So that software along with really comprehensive checklists for what you need to be kind of making sure you’re included in all of your content. Those kinds of checklists are built on a writer’s guide or if you’re in house, a brand guide that is comprehensive, that tells all of your freelancers, we like em dashes, we do not like Oxford comments. We like casual language. We approve of some cussing, but not these certain words, when we talk about our brand, here’s how we talk about it, you know, a really straightforward comprehensive guide, that basically is going to be the Bible for writing for you. So from an agency perspective, we work really hard with clients in the first kind of onboarding phase, to make sure that we are able to get from them and give to our writers, everything those writers need to create content for them specifically. Because you know, we have 20-odd clients, we’re doing hundreds and hundreds of pieces of content in any given month, a lot of our writers kind of overlap. So if we’re not really careful about giving those writers exactly what they need, then they will write the same article, especially in the SaaS and B2B space, you know, there are these like duplicate topics within our space. They’ll just write, you know, the same article over and over again. We want it to sound like our client wanted it to sound like. So that’s kind of how we address trying to standardize quality:  software alongside comprehensive processes. Now, how do we address the quantity versus quality thing? Let’s get into that really briefly. I am in a weird place on that very controversial conversation. Where I think so long as we maintain and publish a really good standard and quality content, volume is the next step. Two reasons for that. Firstly, I’ve been doing this for a while, you’ve been doing this for a while, I think we’re probably pretty good at our jobs. And if our clients asked us, can you promise me any ranking position or any amount of traffic after any amount of time, you and I would say, I’m sorry, we can’t. We know what we’re doing and we’re good at it, but I cannot promise you anything. Because I don’t know, all we do is do everything you can do as well as it can be done, and you throw it into the black hole of Google and hope that some of it sticks.

John Tyreman:  Like throwing spaghetti at the wall, right? 

James Scherer:  Exactly. Throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that some of it sticks. And a key component of throwing stuff into a hole is that if you throw a lot of it, more of it’s gonna stick than if you throw not that much of it. The second side of that, which works very much in tandem is optimization of existing content. So if you throw a bunch of that spaghetti at the wall, and some of it sticks, or some of it starts to slide down, you can catch it and say, after three months, or after six months, I’m going to optimize that piece of content. And it’ll go from you know, and hopefully, if it’s gotten to the second page of Google and plateaued, I can take another look at it, improve it, update it, optimize it, and push it to the first. So long story short there is the idea of quality versus quantity. Once you have attained a high standard of quality, publish a lot. Keep a really close eye on your analytics to determine okay, I’ve published a lot of good content, but nothing’s on the first page, what is the closest that’s getting to the first page of Google? Or what is the closest ranking for a highest high volume search term? I’m going to go in and tweak that piece of content. And then it’s going to get to the first page. So kind of balancing it. But more than anything, keeping a really close eye on your analytics.

John Tyreman:  Okay, and the 15 to 20 number for those supporting articles. Is that a number that you found based on your experience and what works for clients? Or how did you land on that number of supporting articles for each pillar?

James Scherer:  In general, when we talk about – if I’m saying that we need to be doing three to five categories of content, three to five pillars per category, and 20 to 25 pieces of supporting content, that gives me about 100 pieces of content in a given month. Sorry, in any given year. And for most teams, that’s as much as their CMO can edit or their promotional social media team can promote with any regularity. What we’re talking about there is about eight pieces of content – eight to 10 pieces of content in a given month. And that is the kind of the sweet spot for… this is as much as our newsletter audience can handle and will open. This is as much as our social media team can create valuable content for. This is as much as we can edit, like from an internal perspective, like our team can only review so many drafts in any given month. I wouldn’t go below that, though, for most businesses looking to start out, I would say eight to 10 pieces of content per month is as little as I would recommend you do for the first six to nine months. Because again, we’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.

John Tyreman:  Yeah, I can see how a lot of internal teams can be a bit strapped and eight to 10 articles a month, that could redline a lot of different content teams. So I guess, to your point, that’s why it’s so important to have a good process in place and to leverage tools when you can. I’m curious, one more kind of piece that’s missing for me is like, okay, word count for these articles like, what’s the ideal word count for, let’s say pillar pages versus this supporting content that you’re talking about?

James Scherer:  Maybe in general, it’s going to depend on the competition. But honestly, we try to ensure that that is basically 100 to 2500 words per piece. Supporting content could be a little bit lower. But pillar pieces can be, you know, whatever the competition is kind of doing within reason. However, that said, and I’m sure you may have more insight into this than I do, we have found that we have some affiliate oriented clients who were massive fans of 25,000 word articles or 10,000 word articles. However, I know, I know. However, after the May-June algorithm update, we saw a lot of those ranking content decline. I think simply because of the massive page size, and load times, and user experience being more, you know, more heavily weighted by Google, we did see a decline in ranking positions for massive content. So be aware of that. The other thing I will say really briefly on the idea of pillars:  a pillar is not exclusively a piece of content written for a keyword that has high volume. It can also be a valuable search term for your business. So for instance, if you do project management tool – if you do project management software, the key phrase project management software is going to be far more high intent, than the key phrase project management. Project management is like, what is project management? How do you do project management? It’s very top of funnel search term. So one thing that may be an even more valuable pillar piece for that category for your business would be something that’s more oriented towards the search intent. So keep that in mind. And as a result, it may not necessarily need to be quite as long as a more tofu search.

John Tyreman:  James, there are two case studies that I want to ask you about. monday.com is obviously a big name. And I want to ask you about that experience. But first, one of your case studies really stood out to me. You helped Early Bird, which was an investing platform and mobile app, go from zero to 25,000, is it unique monthly visitors in less than a year? Can you share that story?

James Scherer:  For sure. And actually, the number is now 55,000 in 15 months. So very exciting with them. So yeah, they came to us very early stage startup. They had done a like small round of funding, so they had a little bit of cash to throw around and throw in some growth campaigns. So they came on without a blog, their domain authority when they came with us was 23. So really, you know, okay, we got to start building some momentum with intention here. So we had mentioned the pillar post strategy with them. That was kind of my first like, from zero, let’s give this a shot and see how it performs. Incomplete, you know, no existing content optimized, no domain authority to build off of. Identified three to five categories of content related to their product, some of which were more top of funnel, some of which are more, kind of centered around what they do exactly. They do financial gifting, financial gifting app, the idea being that like parents and uncles and aunts or whatever can contribute financially to a child’s future, through financial gifting. So really interesting platform. And three to five categories, three to five pillars per category. And then over the course of the first six months supported those pillars with a bunch of support content. They were doing eight pieces of content a month of around around 16,000 words a month. And in kind of the end of Q2, of last year, we basically did a full audit of how they were doing and identified that one of their categories, the gifting category was performing really well -, like organically performing really well. So we said, okay, let’s double down on that. Let’s drive traffic from this. Drive links from ranking content to some of the other categories of content. And yeah, it just all came together. So they are now I checked today, actually, that I have to do their case study page. They are at 55,000 unique views on a monthly basis. And actually, they’re increasing still at about 84% month on month, unique traffic. So last month, they had 30,000 and this month they 55,000. So yeah, it’s a really exciting… what was interesting with them, and this is kind of something to take away, for your listeners, they’re now in the place of “Oh God, we have a bunch of traffic, we need to seriously step back and see how we’re converting these people”. You know, which is an entirely different conversation.

John Tyreman:  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, conversion rate optimization is a much different game than it is driving traffic to a page. I’m curious, James, you mentioned that in Q2 last year that you did an audit for this company. Can you give us a little bit of a peek behind the curtain – what’s involved in a content audit like that?.

James Scherer:  There’s two different types of audit for me. There’s the kind of ongoing monthly or weekly/monthly audits, which, honestly, I use Ahrefs, I just use Ahrefs or I mentioned SEMrush and Moz, do something similar. I know SEMrush does. Ahrefs allows you to within their site explorer, see exactly what keywords a URL or a domain is ranking for, which URLs are ranking, what the volume is, what the position is, you can see the month on month change and ranking positions for each of those URLs for each of those keywords, and export it extremely quickly and easily. And that’s literally all my constant agency does on a monthly basis is says, “These are the URLs that we’ve published with you, these are where all of them are, this is one I’m excited about because it’s gone from, you know, 11 to eight in the past few weeks. That’s all that’s, you know, that’s gonna be driving traffic. Here’s the ones that I think are opportunities.”  All of which is just exported and broken down from Ahrefs. Now, on a quarterly basis, we do a full on sit down – “Okay, here’s what we published, here’s how it all performed, again, based on Ahrefs”. But also like, “here’s the traffic being driven”, because you know, Google Analytics access is crucial to true accurate reporting, or if they’re using, you know, a non GA analytic platform, that’s fine, too. Getting traffic analysis, incorporating Search Console. So what are the searches that you’ve been found for and what is the value of them? And then from my side, more recently, I’ve really been emphasizing, “here are the opportunities I see in your site”. On a quarterly basis, I’m saying, here are your, what I refer to as elevens, which are those URLs which rank commission 11th and 30th position for a search term with more than 250 search volume. The idea being that these are the URLs that with a little bit of love and little bit optimization, we can push to the first page and drive significant traffic. So whenever I’m doing an audit, I say, “Yeah, here’s where everything is. But also, here’s what I want to do with some opportunities that I’m seeing here, so that we can go into the next quarter with a clear strategy for growth”. Not just a quick strategy for… “Okay, this is what our performance was, we’re going to do it all again”. It’s no, “Here’s what our performance was. That’s awesome. What can we do to improve it? What are the steps we can take to optimize existing content? And okay, if you’re not seeing conversions, what are my recommendations there?” So it’s pretty comprehensive.

John Tyreman:  It sounds pretty comprehensive. And I like that term, “your elevens”. I’ve recently, like going to the first page of any search results page is just like, littered with ads and like, featured snippets. And like the first organic listing is like sometimes, like below the fold, like damn near the second page. I contend that the second page of Google search results is no longer the best place to hide a body. What do you think about that?

James Scherer:  I 100% agree, which is absolutely wild, because… but another thing with that is that like, there are no longer 10 search results on the first page of Google, like at all. Like a lot of the search that I’m seeing have like seven, eight. And so we’re like, we’re getting all stoked that like, you know, one of our URLs went from 11th to nine. And I’m like, oh, actually, ninth isn’t on the first page anymore. Because there’s ads or because there’s whatever, whatever. So that’s the thing. But yeah, no, I think you’re probably right. I haven’t seen clear traffic. I haven’t seen that reflected in the traffic quite yet. But I wouldn’t be surprised that people are leaving the first page behind because it’s too cluttered with ads and featured snippets and map results or whatever they’re not looking for, and go into the second to find the true organic results.

John Tyreman:  Well, I know that I’m one of those users. I find myself in the second and third page of search results quite frequently actually. Well, James, this is a great case study about Early Bird. I do want to ask you about your work with monday.com. That’s a brand that a lot of people know. And the case study is quite impressive. So you produced 100, high quality expert level articles each month. Now that is a lot to produce. Can you share a little bit about your process producing that much content in that little time?

James Scherer:  Yeah, yeah. We did 825 pieces of content in a year. 

John Tyreman:  Wow. 

James Scherer:  So it was between 70… Yeah, was around 75 pieces on average, but the first few months were 100 pieces per month. So monday.com, very different from Early Bird. You know they are… their marketing budget is seven figures per month. That’s what we’re talking about.  Anybody who’s been on YouTube or been retargeted at all in the past year probably knows monday.com from that. So they came to us saying, essentially, “We’re looking for multiple agencies to create the volume of content we want to create”. And we said, “How much are you looking to do?” And they said, “800-odd in a year”. And we said, “We’ll do them all”. And then we looked at each other after that call and said, “Wait, what? What did we just agree to?” But they gave us four weeks to get ready, which for us, luckily enough, you know, we are big enough. And we have enough writers on kind of on hand or benched from previous clients, that we were able to bring in a substantial, you know, part of the writing force there – we already had on staff or were able to, you know, grab relatively quickly. But it ended up being about 25 writers, averaging between three and four pieces of content per month per writer. We were extremely…they went through a week of training, to get them up to speed on exactly what monday.com was looking for. monday.com did four different types of content. So not just categories, but they did format, like different formats of content. Some of their versus stuff, so Monday.com versus Clickup, or Monday.com versus Trello, or whatever. That kind of stuff. They did “Best Of” listings like, best project management tools, best digital planner, best task management platform, whatever, best of pieces, along with kind of a more pillar and post structured content plan. So getting the writers all up to speed on that and getting the editors up to speed, getting the brand guidelines and the writer’s guide set in stone, building our own processes within the project management tool that we use, which somewhat awkwardly was not Monday.com at the time. Getting that all set up took us about a month, and then we dove in, we had writers and editors who were dedicated to their account only. We’re still working with Monday.com. We’re now doing… We did 100 pieces in Q1, and we’re doing another 100 in Q2, so they slow down a bit. But you know, they’re still doing 30 pieces of content in any given month at 2000 words. So still doing significant volumes of content. For them, you know, the pillar and POST method was a little bit more comprehensive in scope. They did do, here are the pillars, here is the supporting content, but identification of the pillars was based on a very comprehensive point system, which scored a search term or a topic based on a dozen variables, including, you know, cost per click for that search term, a kind of a je ne sais quoi valuation of like intent for the search term. Like on one, I think on a one to five scale. So five being like project management software would be like a high priority search term for them. Whereas something smaller volume or whatever that wasn’t as related to their platform would be lower. Of course, you know, search volume, competitiveness… I think something like 10 to 12 different variables affecting whether, and then they scored each search term based on those. And that determined the priority publication, like approach. So getting those high priority pillar pieces up first. And then intentionally and intelligently linking to them with supporting content within the same category. All of which was kind of built out in a very comprehensive model by both my team and thiers, to… Here’s how we’re linking, here’s what we’re linking to. Each writer had a comprehensive outline, essentially, that they were working to, for each piece. But yeah, that’s how the big boys do it. And it was, you know, that they’re seeing 100,000 more ranking positions than they were two years ago. I can’t give exact traffic results because of, you know, big client conversation stuff, but I’m sure you know, they’ve driven hundreds of 1000s of visitors through the content we created. They’re ranking first for project management software key phrase. So… which was a content piece that we put together for them, so it’s definitely a success story. There are lessons to be learned from smaller businesses. Namely, you know, intentional identification of good topics for you, considering how you’re supporting each article, giving your writers and your editors a really clear understanding of what they’re writing to and what they’re editing for and how each piece is being linked together. All of that can be taken away for small and medium sized businesses. But the volume of it was intimidating.

John Tyreman:  Well, it seems like the strategy and the concept and the method behind it is all the same. It’s just between these two case studies. The only difference is really the volume.

James Scherer:  Yeah, ultimately, which is… kind of just goes to show that it makes sense to do it this way. It makes sense to create content that is very competitive, and then support it with secondary content and external links. Which is not – like that’s not a new, you know, strategy for content success. But it is one that when done – it is not always done well, I guess I would say.

John Tyreman:  Yeah. Well, okay. So it sounds like businesses of any size can benefit from this pillar and post method, investing in content marketing. Content marketing is changing, though. What do you think the future of content marketing looks like, let’s say in 2022, and beyond? Is it worth the investment?

James Scherer:  Absolutely, it’s worth the investment. I mean, our like… we have a client called Early Bird who, in the past 15 months has driven 50,000, unique visitors to high intent searches organically to their site every month, through investment in content marketing. I think it’s intimidating for businesses. And that has always been the case that, you know, in six months, in the first six months of investing in this, you’re not going to see serious numbers, or you’re unlikely to see serious numbers of traffic or results from it. And so for a lot of early stage businesses, that’s a long time to go without results. But in the long run, you’re still driving a far more positive ROI in the long run than you do from something like outbound or from PPC, or from a lot of other sponsored kind of, you know, marketing investments. Let alone that you’re driving traffic, which is –  their first touch point with you isn’t that of sales, but of educational value, that their first touch point is I’m learning something from this business, they are delivering value to me really clearly. So when they say, oh, by the way, our software, our product or service, helps you address this pain point you clearly have… that message is received with like a level of trust, you know, rather than immediately standoffish and defensive, which I think people are getting more and more standoffish and defensive of sales content. So yes, absolutely there’s still value in it.

John Tyreman:  Yeah, no, no, no, you’re absolutely right. I think trust is a major piece of this, and especially with editorial content strategies where your goal is to really help the user and to provide as much value as you can. And, James, a lot of our conversation today has focused a lot on the written word, and artificial intelligence can transcribe audio. And these tools have been doing a better and better job over the last few years, right? And that leads me to believe that it’s possible that search engines like Google may have the ability to crawl audio and video to rank and search. What would you say to that?

James Scherer:  It’s a really interesting question. I do not – yeah, I 100% think that Google, if they aren’t already doing it, or can’t already do it, will be able to check audio or video content, and rank it based on the content of the video, not just the meta descriptions of the video, you know, on YouTube, or whatever. They are already actively kind of rewarding video content in search, you know, because they’re pushing the idea of YouTube being not just a place for people to watch video trailers, or video games or whatever, but also to deliver high quality educational content. But they’re not quite to the point where they’re rewarding over high quality written content as yet. I’m more interested from an AI perspective, in AI written content, AI written like long form content, which I think for a lot of our freelancers is a really intimidating prospect.

John Tyreman:  It’s gotta be scary, right? They’re gonna lose their jobs.

James Scherer:  And transcription as well. Like if you can just have your CEO doing something, then have a transcript, just plug it out, and it’s word perfect, which it’s not currently. I haven’t found any software that’s word perfect from the transcript perspective. Also, you have to tweak it all and format it all, but AI written content is interesting. I imagine that the majority of businesses who are listening or who are creating long form content and succeeding at it are going to be in the SaaS and B2B and, you know, consumer services kind of world because that’s where a lot of the… that’s where content naturally finds its niche. Those industries, the content those industries are creating needs to be thought leadership. It needs to bring something new to the table in order to rank effectively in rank well, because you can do everything from best practices perspective to rank, you know, along with SEO best practices. But unless you’re bringing true value, the bounce rates are going to be high, the time on page is going to be low, because you’re not actually doing anything better than anybody else. Which means for me that AI written content is never going to succeed, because AI cannot, by definition, create anything novel. It can’t bring anything new to the table, period. It can review all the ranking content and create something that is just as good as that, perhaps in a few years. It’s not currently there yet. But it cannot, by definition, bring a new thought to the table. And Google has been telling us for a long time that the content that they’re going – they’re trying to get better and better at identifying when readers are engaging with a new idea within written content. So while I think AI can help you write, I do not think that it can do it for you.

John Tyreman:  That’s a great point. And it supports this notion that people are the biggest driver of performance. You can’t emulate that human creativity and the human element that you need to be able to connect with other human beings. And I think that what you just said is in support of that.

James Scherer:  I mean, that goes back a little bit to the audio and video component as well, which is that if I do have a… when I was in house at a tech startup in Vancouver, we for a long time, added straight forward 32nd introduction videos to the top of every article. Kind of instead of a featured image, we had a video embeds, which is basically just the writer, the author saying, “Hey, I’m James Sherer. Just wanted to quickly, you know, talk a little bit about what you’re going to get in this article”. And it was my face against, you know, a legit backdrop with legit sound equipment and mic’d up. We had a room to basically filmed those videos in. And apart from SEO, ignoring all of the like components of that, and the ability to, you know, put them on YouTube, or whatever and drive links in the description. I think it’s also just valuable to show your face to your target, you know, your target reader, your target market. Again, talk about ways to increase trust. Sure, bring something new to the table and, you know, bring thought leadership to whatever you’re doing. But showing your face or talking in your voice has a subconscious effect on the readers trust in that source of information for sure. So, if you can do video, if you can do audio, 100% do. I’m just saying that because there’s like a risk component of it, is that if you do it poorly, then trust goes down far more quickly than if you left it out entirely. But if you do it well, holy hell, suddenly you’re showing your face, showing your expertise, introducing yourself to your prospect on a personal level. And then when you say by the way, our software, our service makes this easier for you, they have to say no to you, as James Sherer, not no to a brand, not no to some faceless corporation. But they’re actively saying no, I don’t want your thing James, whose face I know and whose  smile I recognize, which is I think more difficult.

John Tyreman:  Yeah, people trust other people more than they trust logos, that’s for sure. And your point is well taken James, that there are really three skills that an expert really needs to have, it’s you need to be able to speak about your subject matter, you need to be able to write about it, and then you need to be able to network with other people in that field. And if you can do all three of those, the medium of the content that you produce, whether it’s the written word, whether it’s audio or video, as long as you’re communicating that expertise in an effective way, that’s how you’re going to build trust.

James Scherer:  If we think about the people who exemplify those traits, for me, the one that stands out, who excels with all of them, is actually Rand Fishkin of Moz. Well, not Moz anymore, but for me, he’s always Rand Fishkin of Moz, who was one of those guys who was able to really effectively communicate his expertise in the written word, also by video, and then also on the conference stage. And I have no idea what that guy’s like one on one but I’d bet based on his on his whiteboard videos from years ago…

John Tyreman:  Whiteboard Fridays.

James Scherer:  Whiteboard Fridays man like, let alone watching some of his conference speeches. There are a few marketers out there that we all don’t know the name of, I think because they excel in those three areas that you just mentioned. Trying to do what they do or effectively, you know, get yourself into that place through practice and doing it in the mirror or doing it on podcasts or whatever, is not the worst use of your time.

John Tyreman:  Yeah, that’s a great point. You need to be comfortable with your own voice. I remember the first time that I started editing podcasts, listening back to my own voice, it was like nails on a chalkboard. But if you can get over that, and you can get over that imposter syndrome, then, you know, like you said, there is a little bit of risk if you don’t do it well. But if you can get over that, and keep trying, and then learn how to do it well, and do it consistently over time, I think the use of audio and video can be a great way to stand out above the fray.

James Scherer:  I think it’s pretty obvious from this podcast, John, that I love the sound of my own voice. Yeah, I agree – listening back to them can sometimes make you question your own sanity, but they’re fun to do as well. And I think that that takeaway for a lot of people as well is that a really, really cool way to step outside of your day to day is to mess around with podcasting, mess around with video, try something new, one of these new channels for content or for growth. Even if you don’t, you know, even if you don’t do it for very long. Because you don’t see the ROI or whatever, I would urge any business to get into it, at least for a while because it is so much fun, genuinely. You meet great people, you network effectively, and you get to, you know, talk to somebody else about the thing that you, hopefully you’re passionate about, for half an hour, 45 minutes, which isn’t the worst way to spend an afternoon.

John Tyreman:  No, no, it’s not. And you’re absolutely right. I love hearing all of these different perspectives on marketing. And I’m just a curious person, myself. I consider myself a perpetual student of marketing. And it’s just been, it’s great to be able to interview all these bright minds, like yours. And, James, I know that we’re coming up on our time now. And I just want to thank you so much for your time, your insights, your flexibility with some of those technical hiccups earlier, but if folks want to connect with you and learn more, where can they find you?

James Scherer:  By the way, I really enjoyed this as well, John, thank you for having me. I would love to, you know, talk about this stuff all day. I can honestly you know, codeless.io is the website. Feel free to book a consultation, or we can just talk strategy there. Honestly, as well though, email me at james@codeless.io. That’s, you know, I’m open to, you know, this kind of conversation all day every day. I’m more than happy to put down real work to talk to somebody about this stuff.

John Tyreman:  Excellent. All right. Well, if listeners out there want to connect with James, email him at james@codeless.io. Check out codeless.io and book a consultation and talk some shop with James. Well, James, thank you so much again, this has been a pleasure.

James Scherer:  Thank you, John. Really appreciate it.