Digital Marketing Strategy Matthew OBrien on the PirateBroadcast with Russ Johns

I had the pleasure of being a pirate on the PirateBroadcast with host Russ Johns. In this episode, we discuss personal “executive” branding strategies by building your expertise, authority, and trust (EAT). We address the importance of being a local business for business owners to elevate their business brand online and the impact of having consistency with your name, address, and phone number (NAP) data.

If you would like to learn how to start your own podcast, go to https://russjohns.com/ for more information.

Here we go…

 

Timestamp with Links to Sections 

1:44 – Origins of MINT Social

4:05 – Podcast Business

7:01 – Content Marketing and Distribution

12:10 – Creating Content with Old Content

18:48 – 2 Principles – EAT & NAP

22:19 – Road trip & broken hip

29:38 – Value-added business

 

Russ Johns:  Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast, where we interview interesting people doing interesting things, where you can expand your connections, your community. Kindness is cool, and smiles are free. Let’s get this party started.

It’s a fantastic day for a #PirateBroadcast because it’s one of those things we have to bring to light and share with people. I’ve got a few stories to tell you, but first, I want to introduce Matthew O’Brien.

Matt has been a friend of mine, a connection, an acquaintance as well as a resource for a few years now. We were talking about live streaming, broadcasting, and things like that. I said, “Let’s get you on the show and produce some conversation that other people can use.” Let’s not keep it to ourselves, Matt. How are you doing?

Mathew O’Brien:  I’m doing fantastic. It’s always a pleasure seeing you. I just love that we’ve reconnected. We’re running in parallel missions, so we’re going to help each other out along the way, too.

Russ:  It’s fantastic. I am more excited about how live streaming has been developing. Many people, early adopters, understand, and they appreciate some of the things that go along with bumping your knees on the technology and false starts. You’ve got to push the boundaries a little bit.

However, you’ve been in this business for a long time. MINT Social has been around for a while now. 

Can you give us the origin story of MINT Social and how you got hooked into this whole social media thing?

[1:44] Matthew:  It started in 2008. I was in a business transition, and I found myself needing to find a job. I went out looking for a job. When I was talking to them, I was taking a consultative approach. I found what they (businesses) all needed, and what I was thinking at the time were an opportunity, building content marketing, and syndication engines.

They all were trying to figure out social media. It was brand new. I was like, “Wow. Nobody’s really going after it hard.” Instead of finding a job, I said, “Time to start a business.” I’ve been working on what I call the “digital footprint,” thinking of yourself and your brand as a wine cellar.

You’re going to build a bunch of these digital assets and profiles like LinkedIn and Facebook. The more they grow (and age), the more powerful they get. It becomes your marketing engine.

I’d started in social as a way to build those digital assets and create a content marketing and syndication engine for brands that we don’t hug and then the brands we really care about (the people in front of the brands). We’re a marketing engine for a company.

Russ:  It’s amazing how subtle it is and so necessary. 

Joe, the business owner, is out there, attempting to get something in place. They’re trying to grow an audience. They’re not really sure what to do, how to do it, and what needs to be done first?

Many people probably say, “Oh, yeah, I have a Facebook page,” but it’s not really working or not being measured. It’s not doing them any service at all. It’s just a distraction.

When businesses take a distributed model, SEO, and some of these elements and start measuring them, they can really make a difference. They can be measured, they can be monitored, and they could be improved.

[4:05] Matthew:  True, for sure. What about yourself?  I’m going to jump in here and ask you a question. When we first met, I didn’t know your full background. I knew that you had been to radio and media. You had helped with essentially building channels and stations, getting people visibly noticed, and building an audience. You were doing some different jobs.

Here you are doing the passion that you had found. You have perfected it over the way. The number you shocked me with was, you said, “There are only a million podcasts online.” I would think that podcasting is old school.

I remember when I started MINT Social in 2008, and Evo Terra wrote “Podcasting for Dummies.” I thought, “It’s been around forever.” 

You’ve morphed your brand into the podcast Pirate Syndication. You have a whole business model.

You’re a perfect example of someone that has been out there and realigned all of your digital assets to focus on one thing, and it’s working.

Russ:  If you type in #PirateBroadcast, from last October when I really started using it, it brings up my profile. It’s starting to build a little traction there, which is, for me, interesting in the fact that we can take something and just continue to build on it. Continue to use it, and consistency, over time, builds a reputation.

If you want to be visible, you want to have authority, the best way to do it is to create content that’s seen across multiple platforms consistently. Once in a while, you’ll get those unicorns where there’ll be a really great article that’ll take off and blow your channel up a little bit. However, that’s not necessarily a requirement for building a business.

You’re not based on your success in having a viral post or not. Consistency is going to be much more effective than hoping for that one out-of-the-park post that goes viral.

Matthew:  It’s the cadence of it. It’s consistent. I have to go back because you said doing content, but what you’re doing is great content. Maybe not this episode. We’ll see how it works out.

Russ:  [laughs]

Matthew:  You’ve stepped it up. It’s very professionally done. In fact, this is what you do. 

You create shows for people. You do this whole personal branding program. Hats off to you. I love it. 

I’m looking forward to what we’re going to work on together. I think that’s fantastic.

[7:01] Russ:  To your point, people need to understand that you don’t have to be overwhelmed by the content. You don’t have to be overwhelmed by the process. You don’t be overwhelmed by technology. There are people like Matt and I that enjoy working in it. We enjoy what we do. We enjoy looking at these things and helping other people out.

It’s one of those things that you don’t learn overnight. It’s not a book, and you’re done with it because it’s always changing. It’s evolving. You have to test and evaluate some of the situations you’re in.

I love what you’re doing with the content distribution engine. That, to me, will be something that’s going to allow people to pour a little Google juice in their online presence and make a little bigger impact.

I don’t know that we have time to go over everything today, but maybe if you could give us a snapshot of: 

How it (content marketing engine) all comes together

Matthew:  Sure, let’s take this podcast show. This is going to go through a process. We’re going to get a transcript. The first thing we’re going to do, and I know you’re already doing this.

Russ:  Yeah.

Matthew:  Then you look at it from a content standpoint, and you’re doing relevancy to what your business is. Keywords, and maybe it’s not. I look at LinkedIn, as there’s three Matt O’Brien’s. There’s a Matt O’Brien that says, “CEO of MINT Social.” There’s Matt O’Brien that likes to do community outreach and help non-profits.

Then there’s me as a human, and LinkedIn is a little less than that. Those are the things that we’re going to look at. What one of those, or all of them, are you going to tell the story about?

Usually, it’s business, and then we’re going to look at the content that matches the things that you want to drive relevance, people that are searching. I say, “Start with your passion.” Don’t try to be getting traffic for something that you don’t care about.

The story of why you can help someone out is more interesting than you getting ranked for it. It’s going to be the reason why I respond to it. We take the story transcript. We have a video. We can do audio so that we can put it on a podcast. We can put it on YouTube.

We can create a PDF of the transcript or give a download it. We’re going to have some goodies as a result of this probably. Get this download here, and we’ll make sure that we do that. There are photos, screenshots of us doing what we do, cool branding around the way.

We’re looking at 50 or 60 different places that we can now publish video, audio, podcast, a blog post, a press release. If we want to do a press release, and then we have all the social media, we’ll treat this one event as a campaign that will be at least three months.

We have all of these different ways to publish the content. What we’re really doing is we’re linking and attributing back to what is the one story, the one place we want everyone to go, and usually, it’s YouTube.

I want my YouTube video ranked really well and lots of epic. I want the blog post or the article that I’m going to write about, which tells the story, and’s very engaging and interactive. We’ve got the downloads and stuff.

You’re going to do that on your website, and I’m going to do that on mine. Then we’re going to create a business ecosystem around that. That’s what you do with a piece of content. It takes a lot of work to do that. But if you don’t do that, it becomes a piece of content that nobody gets to see or hear, or you don’t get to help anybody.

Russ:  That’s the concept that I wanted to present for this syndicate. If you have a syndicate of individuals, even if their business is not the same, or even if they’re a collaborative business, businesses that might be able to collaborate, office products versus office machinery.

Some of these complementing things, you can go around, and you can do a show around this idea that you’re interviewing the person on your left, so to speak. Realistically, you could get a lot of content created in a concise period of time that you could use to grow for months and months and months.

Some of the articles that really bring up — and I know you know this — getting something from a medical journal or a highly published location, that really makes a lot of difference in our publishing engine that should be published on long term websites that have been up for a long time.

Matthew:  Big time.

Russ:  There’s a name for that, being attributed to the show?

[12:10] Matthew:  Sure. Yeah, you’re right. Those big links are really what we’re looking at. What’s interesting is, we always see that there’s a high degree of willingness, “I want to help out, I want to promote, and I’ll publish this.” What happens is, it’s like anything else, it takes extra work, and you had to think through this stuff.

Quite honestly, people just aren’t in that mode of publishing stuff. As partners and if we’re building this ecosystem, we can make it so easy that somebody can publish something, and those attribution links that you were talking about can serve a purpose, now. You’re building all of that energy and relevancy.

You use many tools that you’re aggregating social media, and you do a nice job with this show. It gave me some ideas. Like, “Here’s the post. Publish this. Go into LinkedIn.” That’s just the start of something that if you build on that, and somebody builds on it, any piece of content they create with somebody else, they’re going to get probably two X the return by just doing that.

The earlier you do it when it comes in, the more powerful it is because it’s like a bottle of wine. There’s that link seller over there, a perfect link. It was there right at the beginning, as all of these things.

I know we’re geeking out, but it really comes out to. It has to be stupidly easy because we don’t have time to do that stuff like producing. I’ve always wanted to do a podcast show, but I don’t have the time or energy.

I would go to someone like you and say, “Can I just show up?” Then all of that other stuff gets done. The content becomes fun because you have a strategy. I have one other thing that I wanted to share, that when we in Social redid our website, it was a disaster. We got hacked. It was an old website with some vulnerabilities.

What I did is reorganized years of content into a new architecture. It was tough, but it’s paying off. I want to give anyone out there that’s been doing content and thinks that their content isn’t good anymore, you can re-architect.

With your podcasts, you may find a vein, like medical, there’s a bunch of people talking about this. You pull those segments out, and you create a category around that. Now you have an intense topic. You can, overnight, become a sensation for that term because you already have great content just sitting there.

That’s what’s cool about what you’re doing, is that you can go back into the archives and find content and conversations and really go after terms and get ranked pretty powerfully.

Russ:  That’s really what I was excited about, Matthew, is that you are so good at the ability to see where other content and other back-links and things like that can be repurposed again, for its highest value.

Matthew:  Great work.

Russ:  I’m really good at creating content. [laughs] I can create a lot of content in a concise period of time. However, I haven’t always spent time deciding and identifying where it needs to go to make its biggest impact. That’s why I’m excited about it. This opportunity, this intersection of our two skill sets, is merging into something amazing.

Matthew:  I’m excited about that.

Russ:  I want to shout out to some of the people in the room that are here. Angie, “Good morning, Pirates, great to see you all.” Awesome.

Matthew:  [laughs]

Russ:  Cyna, “Good morning, Russ and Matthew, how are you today?” Then Celine, “Good morning, Russ.” Khan, “Good morning, Russ and Matthew. Good morning Angie. Ahoy, Pirates. More people just like Russ. I’m not going to send out millions of comments, but you know I have lots to say, Russ.” Hello, Matthew.”

Matthew:  That’s for Russ.

Russ:  “You’re always awesome. Thank you for being here.” Khan, “Always a good morning.” Wendy, “Good morning, Pirates.” Windy is starting the comments in here. Kathy Spooner, “Good morning.” Andrew, “Why this morning?”

Thank you so much for being here. Matthew, I find it fascinating that we have this evolution if you think back when there were one million blog posts and what’s happened since then.

Then you think, “OK, there are there are only a million podcasts, and they’re everywhere.” You’re inside the circle, and I’m inside the circle. We’re listening to podcasts, right? They seem to show up because we listen to them.

Matthew:  Yeah.

Russ:  That’s how it works out.

Matthew:  Totally.

Russ:  That’s an exciting time, really, because there’s so much upside opportunity to help people get their message out. It’s an easy way to do it.

Matthew:  Timeline, you made me think of something. This was a shocking headline in Business Week 2005. It said, “If you don’t have a blog on your website, you could potentially be out of business in three years.” I looked at that, and I’m like, “Whoa, that’s pretty bold.”

Around the time between those three years, there were a million blog posts that were created. That’s a long time ago. Look at what’s happened since.

Do you know what’s great about podcasts? This is our business model. We do it all the time. We interview current clients, We interview their customers, and we get their stories. That’s what we create content from because that’s what people really want to hear.

You have a natural talent to do something that is really the crux of content creation. There’s a couple of geeky SEO terms we’ll talk about if we’ve got time. How much time do we have, Russ?

Russ:  We have about 10 more minutes. We’ve got time.

[18:48] Matthew: There are two principles I want to talk about — What you EAT is your “Expertise, Authority and Trust.” After you EAT too much, you might want to take a NAP, which is “Name, Address, Phone number.”

EAT is what is most important right now. Anyone who’s an author online will need to have an author page with your expertise, authority, and trust. An author page is a page that attributes all of the posts that you write on.

Google is really sticky about it. They call it “Your Money or Your Life.” If you can do something that will impact my money, my life, or my health, then you have to EAT more than anyone else on the Internet. But it’s a good principle to have.

It’s an author page that links to your LinkedIn any accreditations, the university you went to, certificates. It’s everything that you need to know about this person.

When you have that page, any article you write that’s attributed to that becomes more powerful. Then you do podcasts and videos, and you’re linking to that. It’s like you become an expert. That’s how you become an expert online.

After you get the EAT, you’re thinking about your business. Your business is like a license plate. Google’s trying to weed out the Internet, especially now, of locations that “If I’m not on my phone and I can’t…” You can’t serve up that this business is near you. It’s relevant to what you’re looking for.

That’s the name, address, and phone number (NAP). You need to have the exact name, the exact phone number, the exact address for that location if you have multiple locations, the same thing.

We’re working on taking the EAT and the NAP and aligning those so that the business is an author. The people are attributed to it are attributed to the business and the author.

All of the content published from this collection is like a microsystem that can plug into an ecosystem. Which is like, “Wow, look at this body of content that’s all really architected.” That’s the future of SEO. I see blockchain being attributed to because you can accredit the content, the people, and how trusted it is in the system.

If there’s an SEO juice naturally, because it’s all accredited, you can actually monetize it, which is the other cool thing about what’s coming down with blockchain. Principle SEO strategy and good content is actually the foundation for monetization of content and people making money from doing stuff like this.

Russ:  Here’s the thing is, the longer I have the conversation, the longer I’m out there having a conversation with you and other people that are doing similar work. It seems like we’re one conversation away.

Matthew:  [laughs]

Russ:  That’s the thing, that one post away, we’re one post, one click away. It’s going with these people. Keep going, man, keep going.

Matthew:  Keep going. You’re right. It all pays off. You don’t want to be the guy on the fence who’s like, “Man, I wish I had stuck to my…” This is a discipline, right?

It’s not easy to do this stuff. The good news is to have good disciplines, you don’t have to be good people, but you’ve got to have good disciplines. That works out. We hope you’re good enough.

[22:19] Russ:  Yeah. I have to tell you a story, Matt. Father’s Day, dad passed away. I moved to Arizona to care for mom and dad. Father’s Day, dad passes away. We figure, “OK, we have a pandemic.”

I’ll tell you the short backstory for this. I have two sisters that are buried in Utah. We said, “Well, we’d better put dad there because that’s where we want to go.”

It was his birthday on the 17th, which was Friday. We went up there, had a little gathering. A couple of people together, a few family members, social distance, all that stuff. He was in the military, so he went through that and did that process.

My son drove up from Texas. He drove up. We said, “Let’s get out of here.” He’d never really spent any time in Utah, so I took him to a few places where I was hanging out. We went up to this place called Francis Peak. It’s basically at the top of this mountain, but it’s a road. He has a rig that he can travel up that road.

He drove up this little hillside here, and he goes, “Could you jump out and take a picture of me coming down or take a video of me coming down?” I was like, “Sure.” I jump out of the rig, and I go running down this hill, and pretty soon, I’m going very fast. All of a sudden, I get airborne. I drop about six feet and land hard.

Matthew:  [laughs]

Russ:  I landed hard.

Matthew:  Oh, man.

Russ:  He pulls the truck down. We didn’t get the shot we wanted, but we got this shot that we needed.

Matthew:  [laughs]

Russ:  I’ll share that with us later. We decided, “OK. Urgent care. Better have an X-ray. What do we want to do?” We’re talking 20 miles backcountry on a rough road. I get in the car, come down, they X-ray it. I’ve got a broken hip. I broke my hip.

Matthew:  Oh, man. [laughs]

Russ:  I break my hip, then I have surgery on Saturday. He needs to get back to Texas. I thought, “Well, I could fly home. I could drive home.” I drove up with mom and my sister. However, one of the challenges I had is if I fell, I would never get back up again.

I had him drop me off. It’s like, this whole menagerie of things that could go wrong. In the back of my head, I’m going, “This is great content.”

[laughter]

Matthew:  The real question is, what were you supposed to learn from all that? There’s got to be a lesson here.

Russ:  I have no idea what the lesson is, but there had better be a damn good lesson in this because it’s like I’m buggered up, and I’m bruised

Matthew:  How are you feeling now?

Russ:  As long as I don’t move, I’m OK. [laughs]

Matthew:  That is quite something. God’s got a plan, and he’s probably talking to you. I just don’t know what he’s saying.

Russ:  He wanted me to have this show today with you, so I got back. I tried to do a show on the road yesterday, and it didn’t work out, I didn’t have a good enough connection, and I’m not sure what wires were crossed on the guest, either.

I had to tell that story. I thought it was totally appropriate that I tell it with Matt because you know my story. You know all my broken bones and everything else.

Matthew:  It’s like, man up to it, man. That’s crazy.

Russ:  Guess what? We’re still here doing the show.

Matthew:  We’re still here doing the show. You see my sign in the back there, right? “Other than think, keep calm, and trust God.”

Russ:  Yes. Keep Calm, and what?

Matthew:  Trust, God. Below is the original. I think my dad worked for IBM, so that’s the keep on thinking. That makes us even more special. You’re a resilient guy. There’s not anything that can put you down, and you’re here to make a difference. That’s what’s beautiful about you.

Russ:  That’s what’s amazing about you, Matthew, is the fact that we could come together and do this thing. Matthew, great info. Loved this info. It’s completely in sync with what I’m working on, both in my real estate online and social media expert presence.

Matthew:  All right. Good to hear. Boom.

Russ:  Yeah, she’s been on social media, author page. I need to get one of those. Here’s my light bulb moment for the show.

Matthew:  All right, good to hear.

Russ:  A nugget of knowledge. I try to bring a nugget of knowledge during every episode, [laughs].

Matthew:  That’s cool.

Russ:  It’s usually not by me, though, so keep going. Olivia says, “Russ, do it solidly for at least a year. I totally agree with you.” Then, “Oh, no. I hope you’re well and healed.” Well, no, not healed yet, but I will get there.

Matthew:  You will get there.

Russ:  “Good morning, Pirates.” Gabriel, thank you so much for being here. Matthew, I know we could talk about this all night long and all day long. I’m excited about the future. I’m excited about some of the things that are going on. I can announce it. I’m producing some shows for another organization, the LGGN network.

We’re going to be doing monthly broadcasts for the oil and gas industry. That would be an exciting, fun shift on focus. It’s an industry that’s had its challenges and had its moments. Let’s get out there and help them out and make sure that they have what they need in content and communications. That’s fantastic.

I know we’ve got some follow-up calls that we’ll be making and putting some things in place to help some of the people out there in the Phoenix market as well.

Matthew:  Indeed. I work with a company that’s building a bio-fuels plant for aviation fuel.

Russ:  That would be cool.

Matthew:  Using forests as fuel. Pretty cool.

Russ:  That’d be great to build a campaign around that one.

Matthew:  Yeah, maybe we can talk about it on the show. What’s happening is that you need an ecosystem. There’s not enough of this type of fuel to be created. That’s a true partnership outside of the box, but that’s for another time. We do have more business to talk to.

I am getting this week to get our plan together, so I look forward to seeing this. I really look forward to connecting with you and working with you because I love you, brother.

[29:38] Russ:  Thank you, Matthew. I love you too, man. Let’s all work together, share a little kindness, help each other out when you see people doing things that you can offer assistance. Free information is not taking anything away from your business. It’s adding value to the equation. It’s adding value to the community.

Matthew’s always been one to create value. You’ve done a lot of volunteer work. You’ve done a lot of great work. You’ve helped me. You’ve inspired me many times. I wanted to bring you on here, Matt, and share some of the things you’ve got going on and some of the things that are really exciting to me.

What’s the rest of your week look like? You got any large epiphanies for us that we want to walk away from or leave today?

Matthew:  The epiphany is that I’ll tease it a little bit what we’re building. You’re obviously part of it, so we’ll give the real big picture. Which is podcasts, it’s the predecessor, and it’s how you build your personal brand.

It’s how you start your story. It’s the training wheels to get the story foundation of what you want to say in your one-minute elevator pitch and how you focus yourself on your business.

If you’re good at that, you go into doing webinars. You’re going to train with PowerPoints. You’re going to record yourself. You’re going to be a teacher. You’re going to give something away for free.

If that content is excellent, we are going to convert that into an e-learning course. Just like your program, you take a person who’s a subject matter expert. You drop them into the Russ John #PirateBroadcast show, and we tell their story. They’ve got excellent content.

In fact, they want to share something. We put them into the PowerPoint. We create a mini webinar, a campaign around it. If everyone loves it, you create an e-book, e-learning, and get monetization of your course.

That’s what we’re building. That’s what you’re working on with us because you’re a definite part of it. That’s passion. We want to work with companies that are purpose-driven, spiritually-focused, and doing good for the community. That’s the ecosystem that I want to build.

Russ:  Perfect. Matthew, thank you so much for being here. I know that we’re going to come back, and we will drop some other knowledge bombs in the future. Right now, we’re going to go ahead and wrap this one up.

I want to remind people that you can always go to the YouTube channel and subscribe if you found value in this episode. Click on the bell and get notified. I just received a text from somebody that says, “Hey, I’ve been looking for your podcast. I know your podcast every day, but I can’t find it.”

Matthew:  [laughs]

Russ:  Matthew, I don’t know what algorithm is going south on me today, but it’s one of those things. “I can’t find it” is not the answer I want to hear in a text message.

Matthew:  [laughs]

Russ:  It’s like, “I’m on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and you can’t find me?”

Matthew:  He’s got to know what to look for.

Russ:  It’s all good.

Matthew:  It’s all good.

Russ:  Thank you, everyone. I really appreciate you and thank you for being part of the #PirateBroadcast and part of the community. I love the interaction that everybody gets from each other in the community. I love that you’re growing and expanding.

If you’re not connected to Matthew, connect with Matthew. He’s an amazing resource and individual. I love the guy. Ensure that you reach out and let him know that you’re a part of the Pirate community if you are in the community.

Matthew:  “Agrhh, Matey.”

Russ:  “Agrhh, Matey.” All right, kids, off to another day. Now that I’ve got my broken hip [laughs], I’ve got to get a really cool cane, don’t you think?

Matthew:  Healing is coming your way.

Russ:  All right, dude, take care. Bye.

Matthew O’Brien:  See you, man.

[Pirate music]

Russ Johns:  Thank you for joining the #PirateBroadcast. If you found this content valuable, please like, comment, and share it across your social media channels. I would love the opportunity to help others grow in their business.

The Pirate Syndicate is a platform where you show up, and we produce the show. It’s that easy. If you want to be seen, be heard, and be talked about, join the Pirate Syndicate today.