Marie, the floor is yours. Thank you and hello. Welcome back, everybody, to another great session of Mindset Mastery. Excuse me, I've got Mindset Mastery on the mind, but I hope you're listening to Mindset Mastery. You're joining the Marketing Playbook Trilogy, and today our master class is on custom content, and this is part two of the three-part trilogy, and you can see that we're joined by our same guest experts that you saw in part one of master class. So again, as we always do at the beginning of our slide deck, we recap some of what we have been covering and who the coaches are. So by now you should all be familiar with Jodi Jacobson from the Human Skills Institute, Natasha Knox from Althea Financial Wellness, Rita Chang from Blue Ocean Global Wealth, Johnny Swift from Impact Communications, and me, Marie Swift from Impact Communications. As you can see, Johnny and I are on the road. We're actually sitting in a WeWorks office space halfway between Kansas City and Minneapolis. So we have made it work here while we're on the road so that we can keep the schedule intact and keep this meeting and keep to our schedule. So let's dive into some of the reminders here. The whole purpose of this master class is to go from theory to practice. So as we've gone through the year, we've been building on the different elements of marketing and how you can use inbound strategies and outbound strategies to create traction and growth for your business. So we've just capstoned a lot of the information here just for reference sake. So I will just mention this, that the Wednesday, November 2nd class, this is our capstone to the year and also for the third part of this trilogy where we're actually going to have the homework that you work on between today's class and that last class in November. You can show and tell. You can bring something that you've created and we will critique it for you. We will collaborate with you if you've just got an idea, a kernel of something that you'd like to share with us, maybe you haven't yet created it. We're hoping that you will all bring your great projects, your concepts and chat with us for a full 75 minutes. Again, it's a little bit longer for this last one and we'll have more of an interactive experience in that last capstone to this trilogy. So as we move into what we want to cover today, we're going to be talking about content and custom content in particular, and this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. So I've been doing this work for 30 plus years with independent financial advisors and the content that we create is always more important and more powerful than the content that we purchase or sometimes that we create with an outsource partner, unless they really understand you and your voice. Johnny Swift has been working alongside me for about 12 years now at Impact Communications and he is just a whiz when it comes to creating great content and actually understanding how to leverage that great content, especially through social media and digital marketing means. Now, next up, just as a reminder, we've got Jodi Jacobsen here and she is the founder and CEO of the Human Skills Institute. You can look her up. She is a prolific writer. She's contributed to Napa Advisor Magazine and many others. And then Natasha, Natasha Knox, she is a financial advisor, financial planner, just like all of you. So she's bringing her perspective as someone who's actually in the trenches doing some of this work and building her business like you are. Now, last time we had Rita and Jodi and Natasha share more about how they use voice and authenticity in their content and their content marketing. So I hope that they'll chime in along the way. In fact, I'm sure they will. But Rita, again, as a practitioner, just like all of you, building her company, Blue Ocean Global Wealth. So now as we dig in, we're going to be talking about custom content as a way to create inbound marketing and pull people to you. And Johnny is going to talk about how you do that, whereas last time we talked more about the why you do it and why it's important to do it. So Johnny. Thanks. Yeah. So today we're going to dig more into the how, how to actually create some of this custom content. And so let's dive right in. So custom content is all about attracting people. It's designed to get the word out broadly. It should be targeted to appeal to your ideal clients. And while attracting the right fit clients, it should also subtly repel the wrong people. It makes you more referable and it's easier for COIs and current clients to share your free, ungated, valuable content rather than just generally refer you, direct people to your website. If they can provide a valuable educational piece of content, that's going to make it much easier to bring good prospects into your funnel. So just to recap, this is something that we've talked about often over the years, but the four C's of content marketing. Today we're going to be focusing on custom, but just to kind of talk about how we think about content when it comes to financial advisor marketing. At the bottom you'll see canned content. That is the easiest to create, but it's also the least impactful. It's something that you might purchase or license. Sometimes you can customize it a little bit. So that makes it a lot easier to get that content, but it's the least impactful because it's not custom, it's not unique to you. And it's something that other advisors may also have. Next on the totem pole is curated. So content that is curated and found by a human that you think might be valuable or a good resource relevant to your audience. It's easier than customer credibility. It's a little bit harder than canned because you have to go search out and find that content, but it's still not unique or custom to you. So today we're going to really be diving into number three here, custom content. Harder to create because it truly is custom and unique, but it's worth it because it positions you as an expert. It shows off your knowledge and expertise. It positions you as a credible thought leader. It also allows you to show your voice and some of your authenticity. And then credibility is also something that we think is important to mix into your content marketing, also known as celebrity or PR. It's hardest because you have to get your content into a publication, whether that's a local, national, or industry publication. But it also has the biggest reach because you get to harness the audience of those publications. So just another way to look at the four C's on kind of a scale here from easy to hardest at the top on the horizontal scale and value and credibility on the vertical scale. So canned content, that licensed content you pay to use, low value but easy to do, curated has a little bit higher value, but also a little bit harder to do since you have to go search out that content. Custom content is the unique content you create and then credibility or celebrity content. So canned and curated both allow you to still show your character and your values based on the type of content that you choose to share with your audience. That can also reflect some of the character and values that you and your audience share. Custom content, in addition to showing your character and values, also allows you to display your knowledge and your expertise and build thought leadership because you're writing about or you're speaking about what you know and what you're an expert on. It also provides a really good value from SEO, especially if you're doing written content because you can speak on different keywords and different topics that you want to show up high in search results for. And credibility also, in addition to all of those that custom gives you, also gives you a halo effect and allows you to be seen almost as a celebrity within your community or your industry. So also just one more thing on SEO, canned and curated can actually be potentially bad for SEO because that is content that's not unique to you. It's content that is most likely going to be showing up in other places across the web, potentially other advisors' websites. So if there's duplicate content and that duplicate article that you have on your website is also on another advisor's websites, Google and other search engines will actually recognize that and ding you and bring you down in search results because that content is not unique and it's widespread across the web. So that also is a really another big talking point for custom content. When it truly is custom and unique to you, not only does it help you with SEO because you're able to write about topics that show up high in search results, work in keywords and things like that, but if it's unique to you, that also helps a lot with SEO. So with that, before we really dig into custom content, I did want to speak a little bit more about canned and curated content, specifically canned. So it is great for saving time and automating your content marketing and social media process. And many platforms out there providing canned financial content are also customizable a bit as well. So if you are crunched for time or you need to supplement your custom content with canned content, a lot of providers out there nowadays give you the ability to customize their canned pieces a little bit. So Wendy Cook has a lot of good pieces, 20 over 10 recently was purchased by FMG Suite. Many of you maybe use their website platform, but they have a great content library that you can feed into your blog. You can search for topics and a bunch of really good articles pull up there that you can then post in its current form in the canned version. But even better, if you can take that piece and customize it to your liking and maybe use the content library as a way to get started, as a way to find ideas or hot topics or things like that, and then customize it, add your own takes, your own insights, things like that, your own perspective. That is a good way as well. Snappy Kraken provides good email, content marketing, canned pieces that you can also customize. Advisor.io used to be Seven Group. They were recently purchased, but they also are kind of a competitor to Snappy Kraken. Content 151 also has a really good content library that you can then tweak to your own liking. So if you are going to go the canned content route, simply because of time capacity issues, things like that, make sure that you customize your pieces and make them unique to you in one form or another. So the value of custom content is it is uniquely yours. It's created by you. It's unique to you. So this could be media and press activity, you being quoted or profiled in a publication, whether that's local, national, or an industry publication. News releases and announcements about you and your firm. So any kind of announcement that you think is newsworthy, you can put out on the newswire, into your journalist list. We'll talk more about that in a little bit when we dive into each of these. Byline content, a bylined article that you publish in a third party that's written by you. Natasha and Rita have both done a lot of that, and whenever you can get your content published in that third party publication, you kind of get a mix of the custom content with the credibility content. So that's kind of the best of all worlds, and you get your custom content boosted out to a much larger, wider audience. And then blog posts, insights, and other educational resources created by you or your firm that live on your website. So that could be written pieces. It could be some kind of checklist or a special report or white paper, something like that. And then more audiovisual, digital media content, like photos, videos, and podcast episodes created by you or your firm that also would live on your website or some of your online profiles. Really good way to, in addition to building expertise and knowledge and thought leadership, allows you to show off your voice and show your authentic side of yourself and let people start seeing who you are as a person by being on camera, letting them hear your voice. And then special reports and white papers, kind of that longer form written content. And pro personal content, behind the scenes glimpses into the character and culture of your firm. So that's really important in this day and age. Also free and without strings matters. So giving people easier access to and easier to access and digest your valuable and educational information and content. It makes it easier for people to share and get the word out, allows you to spread it out to a wider audience. It demonstrates your knowledge and expertise and allows you to display your authentic voice, character and personality. So in addition to building that thought leadership, it really allows you to get your voice out there. It positions you as a credible expert and thought leader. And it also adds value to the industry and community. When you put a piece of content out there that's ungated and truly free and without strings, you are certainly adding value to your clients, your prospects, to your local community and to the industry at whole. And that is good karma, which many of us believe in and that can come around and help you in the end. So here's some examples of character and culture. People are really hungry these days to connect on that kind of level. They want to have more meaningful connections. They want their inner circle to share their values and their interests. And it makes it easier to be human and open up about sensitive topics. So here we see some photos online on social media of advisors kind of showing what they care about, how they're involved in their community. So that is really important, especially since the pandemic, people were looking for more ways to connect digitally and connect with people. And they want to see that their advisor shares similar interests and cares about similar things. And so make sure you work some of that character and culture content into your online presence and kind of lift the veil and show behind the scenes into who the people truly are at your firm. And we showed off this slide last time. Rita does a great job with this, with her online presence. She really, in addition to positioning herself as a credible thought leader, she puts a lot of content out there with her family and showing what the causes she cares about, how she's involved in her community and things like that. And it really helps her show up as an authentic professional. Rita, anything else you want to add there? Sure, I just wanted to say, well, I think what's really important, people ask me how I do it or why I do it. And you ultimately can do what feels right for you because that's who I am. Family is one of my core values. And that picture with me and my daddy, unfortunately, there's not a lot of pictures of me and my dad because my dad was always behind the camera and then me with my kids down there. My son is a little bit camera shy. So I'm also balancing this, too, and I want to make sure my family is on board with it. So it's going to be different for every single person. I think that's what's key here. Thanks, Rita. Agree completely. All right, so this next slide, this is actually a fun tidbit from our friend Angel Gonzalez of Snappy Kraken, but he talks about how important it is to become a magician. So he likes to tell a story about how when he was in Florida walking down a boardwalk and he was just walking down and he saw a magician performing some magic tricks outside of their shop. And so we should all try and be the same way when we post our content online, the same way that he stopped and has attention drawn by the magician on the boardwalk. We want to stop the scroll from those audience members online and draw their attention with the type of content that we're posting so that they have to do a double tape and stop scrolling through their social media feed and see what that is, pique their interest. So the same way that Angel's interest was piqued by seeing this fun magic trick, we should post some fun content. And a lot of that pro personal content really draws attention and piques interest or if it's something that is valuable to the audience. And then you want to make it a desirable piece of content so much so that people are going to click. They're going to take action. They're going to visit your website. They're going to digest multiple pieces of content. They're going to click over to your about page to read more and maybe even over to your contact page to reach out and learn more. So just digging into this a bit further, how to generate content that resonates, address what's on their mind. So that could be money and finances, heritage, longevity, health, lifestyle, legacy. Make sure that you're truly addressing what's on their minds. If you want to produce content that resonates and you can do so by asking your clients what's on their minds and then also even posting on social media, asking what's on people's minds and then produce content around that. If you want to capture that attention with content, trigger emotions, pride, concern, purpose, worry, delight, anger, thrill. All of those are a really good way to trigger emotions. And that's how you're going to capture attention and get more people clicking and reading and digesting your content. And just remember, why do people share content? Well, it appeals to their personal motivations. So either it needs to be entertaining for them, it needs to validate a belief they already have, it needs to touch on causes they care about, their community, it needs to provide meaning for them in one form or another. And that is going to ultimately allow more people to be interested in sharing your content. And so when you create or curate content, just always keep these questions in mind. How does this add value for your audience? How will this help or entertain them? And why will they share it or engage with it? And always remember that the relevant content is going to be somewhere in between what you want to say and what they're interested in. So make sure to always keep that in mind. So, Natasha, I wanted to ask you how you create content that addresses what's on your clients' minds? Yeah, so I actually have a couple of different types of content that I share. And so I have some content that I guess starts as canned content. So I use Advisor Stream and they have a blurb and then I have the ability to choose articles to be able to share premium content that they would ordinarily be behind a paywall. So what I generally do is ignore the blurb, write my own thing that I know is going to just something that's on my mind, something that I think might appeal to my audience. I have a pretty clear picture of who I'm speaking to with any given piece and then I select articles that I think are high value and interesting, which means pretty much none of the articles that they suggest are the ones that I usually add to my newsletter because I work with a very specific clientele. So that's one type of content. When I'm trying to create, I guess what you're calling custom content or credibility, that type of content. Again, I start with what appeals to my target audience. So sometimes I have requests because I tend to take quite a while to create these things. I've learned the hard way only to write on topics that I want to be writing a topic. So just because I understand the topic, just because I could write about a topic doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to do that. Because what I've noticed is that when I write a topic, there'll be like a little swell of interest from different populations that that particular topic appeals to. And if they aren't my target audience, you know, on the one hand, it is very lovely that I was able to put something out there that resonated, but it doesn't really help my business. And it's not a great use of my time. So if I'm going to do that, if it's someone requesting that I write it, you know, I evaluate the request. Or if I have an idea, then I sort of have a process that sort of starts with a mind map. I use those very regularly. I use them to study. I use them to organize my ideas. It helps me get past the blank page of, you know, needing to write something meaningful. I just start throwing stuff down on a page. There's some software that you can use. I use Miro because it allows me to collaborate with others. But, you know, I often just use pen and paper because I find that that process, interacting with paper, I don't really know why, but it helps me. And it's better for me than working with a computer screen. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, definitely. And I actually want to answer another question that we just got in the chat. So does custom content help even if they don't backlink to your website? So I'll kind of address this from custom content and credibility content. So there are times where you're quoted in an article, or if you write a byline article for a publication where they don't backlink to your website, they simply mention your name and your firm's name. Obviously, if you can get that backlink to your website, that's going to provide the most value, both from an SEO standpoint, because there's the value of backlinking, but also from a user experience standpoint, it just makes it that much easier for someone reading that article to click over to your website to learn more about you or your firm. But there is still value there, even if they don't backlink, if they just are including your name and your firm name and text, as long as that text is on the page, Google will be able to read that and see you, your name and your firm name in whatever publication that is going to be a highly relevant publication that gets lots of web traffic. So there is still value there. But obviously, if you can get that backlink, even better. And so it doesn't hurt to, if you don't have that link back to your website, to send an email to your contact at the publication and say, hey, is it at all possible to link back to my website? The worst they say is, unfortunately, we don't do that. And there it is. But Natasha, did you have something to add? I did. And I would say that there is sort of a secondary value, which is that you can then be a great resource for that journalist. And I found actually, there are two ways of being a great resource. One is to go on the record, but sometimes it might be a topic that I don't want to speak about. So I'll give them some comments off the record. And when possible, if I know someone who specializes in that area, I would say, don't be shy about lifting up other advisors and connecting them as well. If you know someone who's an expert, and they'd be a great resource for that journalist, connect them as well. It's worked for me. I find that by not always having to be the person, it almost makes them more likely to reach out to me in the future because we can just have a conversation. All right. Thank you very much. Let's go ahead and move on here. So now I kind of really want to dig into how to actually create this content. And so I think the first step is really determining the format and type of content that you want to pursue. So consider what type of content you'd be best at creating. If you're a really good writer, maybe that's a blog post, a byline article, a special report, or white paper, or something like that. And if you're better at speaking than writing, then maybe you want to go the route of creating a video or a podcast series or something along those lines. Also consider your target audience and think about what type of content they'd be most interested in digesting. So if you serve a certain niche, think about the type of content that they're interested in, and really cater to that type of content, especially if you want to draw more similar clients and prospects. So you need to find that kind of overlap between what your audience wants to know about and what you are a knowledgeable expert on. And next is to determine the topic. So consider what your target audience wants to know about and what they would find most valuable and interesting. Consider what topics you know the most about and find that overlap. Next is to produce the content. So type up a blog post, article, news release, or white paper. You can do that in a Word doc. You can write down on pen and paper like Natasha was talking about. Really, whatever is going to help you get your content out there in that rough draft form is going to be the easiest first step. If you're recording a video podcast or webinar, first thing you need to do is script that, come up with the topic, and then just start filming your recording. I'm going to give some tools for doing that here in a little bit. But after you've gotten the rough draft, make sure to review it, proof, edit, and modify it until it's ready to finalize and release. Maybe run the draft by your spouse or your partner, your business partner, friends, and other colleagues, and kind of just get their takes, especially if you're starting a new content series for the first time. You know, you want to run that by a few people before you really start putting it out there and get it to where you feel comfortable that it's finalized and as good as possible. And then also you want to reformat the content from written to multimedia or vice versa. So if you are doing a podcast or a video, you can also get that transcribed and then get a version of that in text, which not only gives people choice in how they want to digest your content, but by getting that transcript and all that text onto the page, you're going to really get that SEO value because, you know, Google can't, you know, can't read or crawl the content in a video or podcast like it can when it's text on the page. So if you can kind of reformat the content and then chunk it out into multiple social media posts and emails, you can really make one piece of content go a long way and give yourself lots of different smaller pieces of content and longevity in your online presence. And then you want to make it readily available. So promote it far and wide, add it to your website, your online profiles, share it on social media, send it out via email or whatever other avenues you have to get your content out there and make sure it's easy to access and digest that content. And, you know, so that's another thing that points to making it free, no strings attached, ungated. This is truly content that you want to just position yourself as an expert, but also provide value to your community and your industry. So make it as easy and possible for people to share it and encourage your audience, your clients, your COIs to share it with other relevant audiences and people that they think it would be helpful for. Johnny, may I just reflect on a couple of things that you've said. You had a, I just want to mention also what you were saying about that has to do with repurposing some of your content and capturing it. Don't forget if you are one of those people, as Johnny said, who has a real strong preference for writing, whether it's on the computer or handwriting, there are very inexpensive transcription services. Actually, what I mean is if you prefer speaking, like voice to text isn't great, especially for female voices. So what I tend to do is I use something like, what is it, Upwork or Fiverr or one of those services, and it costs very little to have a video transcribed into text, which is another way of doing what you're suggesting is repurposing. And the other thing I wanted to mention is when Natasha talks about her strategy, she sounds very, very clear and very particular and a little bit narrow. And I want to say that that is how you want to be about this, because it helps you with time management tremendously to be so targeted. And, you know, if your content is of interest to others, maybe outside of that very clear avatar that Natasha has of her client, they can read it too. So for anybody who may be thinking, well, I don't know if I can be that specific, because I'll miss people. No, she catches the right people by doing that. And just the other thing I wanted to mention is that fabulous slide that you have with the circles of what you want to say and what they're interested in. One of the things that's implied, I think, in the slides you have after that is that one of the things, I mean, I'm on the coaching and consulting side of this. And so as are Marie and Johnny, with a little bit of help, you can actually increase that space of overlap between what you want to say and what they want to hear by talking with some of your most ideal clients and remembering or asking what they want to hear and how they talk about topics. Because you can still write about what you want to write about as long as you use language to talk about it and connect it to the things that people want to hear. So using all these great tools and techniques that Johnny is suggesting here, those are ways, along with a little bit of internal market research, to be able to expand that space so that you get to talk about the things that you care about. You just translate it into language that you know your ideal clients understand, want to hear about. Yeah, great tips. Thank you, Jodi. And just to clarify, the resources she mentioned, Fiverr and Upwork, those are freelance sites. So you can easily go find someone to transcribe your video, edit your video, really whatever kind of freelance service you need done for a relatively cheap cost. Those are both great resources. We also like to use Descript as a transcription service. It's really, it's probably the best automated transcription service I've seen. But going Fiverr or Upwork and having an actual human do it is really pretty clean, produces a clean transcript as well. Before we move on, I did want to address another question that came in. So it says, if a video has subtitles, does it automatically get rated higher by Google versus some that does not have the subtitles? So if you are, if the subtitles are being put into your video natively in the video editing software and it's just a part of the video itself, then Google still won't be able to read those words on the screen. It would just be the same as, you know, any other image that's within your video. But if the video platform you use has subtitles built in and it can take the audio and add those subtitles as like a setting on that video platform, then that certainly does help and allows Google to capture the words that are in the video and being said. So just keep that in mind. And let's go ahead and move on here. So another idea to generate good blog ideas and ones that are going to show up high in search results. Let's say you were interested in writing a blog post on a Roth IRA conversion. You can simply Google that. And towards the top of a really popular search term like this, you're going to see this section called people also ask. These questions here are a great tool to determine what people are asking, what people are searching for. And you can even take those questions and make that the title of your blog post. So how does a Roth conversion work? What's the downside? How do I convert my IRA to a Roth without paying taxes? And I have even seen other advisors and even some of my clients where if you use that as a blog post and you create a really valuable piece of content that truly answers that question and works in all the relevant keywords, you can even have a chance of being one of the top articles that shows up when you click on that dropdown list. So obviously that's great for your SEO and online presence. And so that's a great way to come up with not just topics for blog posts, but truly the title and what you should focus on around that topic. And another idea here that Jody was kind of just pointing to, but here's a tweet from financial advisor, Wendy Marsden. She said, instead of doing my annual Thanksgiving newsletter, when someone writes me with a question, I'm taking my answer and turning it into a blog entry. That way they're tagged and accessible to find later too. So I've seen a lot of advisors doing this. And when they get a client question, turn that into a piece of blog content, because if one client has a question about something, you can bet that multiple clients do. And you not only get to share that information with your clients, but also provides that valuable public ungated blog content that a lot of prospects might find valuable and educational as well. So, you know, we always say the best way to create custom content is every time someone asks you a question, every time you see something interesting in an industry publication, every time you see something you disagree with in the news or something you agree with, or just a hot topic or current event, blog or record the answer as a video or a podcast, write a byline article for a third party publication, turn that topic into a media pitch, write a special report or white paper around the topic, host a webinar around the topic, and then always push it out on social media and email. But I think the important thing here is just to keep your ear to the pavement for hot topics and current events and listen to what people are asking you. And by being active on social media and staying tuned into industry news, and then also following publications, peers, experts, and other thought leaders, and just paying attention to the type of content that they're producing and the topics that they're talking about that are resonating with their audiences, you'll gain a lot of valuable insight and ideas for your own custom content. So let's dig into a little bit more into each of these different types. So articles and blog posts designed to share your knowledge and expertise, build thought leadership, and position you as a credible authority. It's great to write on multiple different topics that speak to your target audience and also provide value across multiple areas. And articles and blog posts are also great for SEO. As I was saying, those are text and keyword rich. Google loves when website pages are text rich and work in a lot of different keywords. That's going to help you show up higher in search results for those topics and keywords. So just a couple examples here. These are from Intercontinental Wealth Advisors in San Antonio. But this blog post here from earlier in the year was five good investment opportunities outside of the market. They are an investment management firm that wants to be known for their alternative investment offerings. And so this blog post speaks to that quite a bit, not only just investment opportunities in general, but those alternative investments. And it's going to help them show up higher in search results for the different types of investment opportunities they speak on within that blog post because it's so text and keyword rich. And then another topic they wrote about a month later and that they really want to be known for is financial planning and retirement planning. So this blog post preparing for the non-financial side of retirement planning or retirement touched on retirement planning and some of the lifestyle aspects of financial planning. And so very different topics. This one really didn't talk about investment opportunities at all, but also helps them show up high in search results for a different topic that they also want to be known for and show up high in search results for. So try and vary the different topics that you write about for your blog posts and articles. As for news releases, so this is an announcement from you and or your firm. So for example, you could do a news release about if you won an award, if you made a list or a ranking, if you added a new team member to your firm, move to a new office, you launched a new website, educational resource, course or program, maybe you have a new partnership or integration. Any newsworthy announcement could be put into a news release and you want to send that out to local journalists and also syndicated on the Newswire. So for Newswire, we recommend PR Newswire and Globe Newswire. Those are both great services that you can kind of do one-off news releases with. And for sending out to journalists, look at the journalists in the publications within your area, your local journalists. You can go to the publication websites, go to the contact page, track down the editors and their email addresses and create a list that you email out your news releases to. Maybe you also do the same thing for industry publications and send out your news release whenever you have those. And these can be a little intimidating for how to create. So we do have some examples on a website that Impact runs called Media Source Portal. You can see the link there, mediasourceportal.com slash announcements. Lots of different examples there for if you won an award, launched a new website, moved offices, things like that. So take a look there if you're looking for some good examples of news releases. And then videos. Videos are really important. They're better for us, for those of us who are better at speaking than writing. And in addition to showing off your knowledge and expertise, it's a great way to show your character and your personality and start building trust and a sense of familiarity so that when people eventually meet you in person, they kind of feel like they know you a little bit already just from seeing you on camera. So you could do vlogs where you kind of record your educational blog content and speak that to the camera. You could do market updates, explainer videos, kind of talking about your services and solutions you offer. You could do a welcome video on your homepage that kind of shows off your office and your team, speaks to who you are as a firm and an individual and also your mission statement, things like that. You can even do bio videos for each of the team members, which really enhances a team bio on a website and allows people to really feel like they get to know someone rather than just reading about them. And then if you do a webinar, you host a webinar, you're a guest or a panelist on a webinar, posting that webinar recording provides a lot of educational value on your website. And then interviews with partners and centers of influence, whether you're hosting that or you're a guest, if you can post the video on your website, that is going to not only, you know, show off the content and the topic and the educational value of that piece, but also allow people to see who you are as a person on camera. So you can record videos on Zoom, go to meeting or Zencaster, if you're gonna be with another person recording remotely. If you're just gonna be recording by yourself at your desk or in your home or home office, you can simply use your smartphone, just get a little tripod and I'll have some more resources on that in a couple slides. But we like hosting on Vimeo and or YouTube. Vimeo gives you some more customization options on what you want for overlays and different settings. It gives you a really nice embed code that looks great on a website. YouTube is better for discoverability. Obviously that's connected to Google. So it's pretty much a big video search engine. So you might get more views on YouTube, but if your main goal is to have a nice looking video, you can embed on your website. I highly recommend Vimeo, but whatever you do, embed it on your website, share the link on social media and email and just spread that video far and wide. And just one more note on these two different platforms. It doesn't hurt to have a channel on both of them and have the YouTube just for the discoverability and searchability and hopefully getting more visibility, but then Vimeo just for the customization options and for getting that great, looking embedded video for your website. So here's some video examples, what to do or not to do after receiving an inheritance or financial windfall, kind of an educational vlog type piece. Here's an advisor speaking on five things to look for when hiring a financial advisor. Here's a bio video of the CEO of Stone Wealth Management. An interview that I did with Sam Brownell of Stratus Wealth Advisors. A webinar recording, a market update kind of interview on the TD Ameritrade Network, even a holiday greeting video. If you can vary your video content, not only are you gonna give people a lot of good choices for different topics and things they might be interested in, but you're really gonna start building out your voice, your authenticity, letting people see your personality and not only who you are as an advisor, but who you are as a person. Let's see, one question here, can closed caption work on videos for Google? I am not sure. I don't believe so. So I think the question is, if you put closed captions on your video, will that work for Google to be able to recognize the text and show up in search results? I'm unsure about that. Marie says she doesn't think so. All right, let's see. Before we move on to podcasts, Marie had a question here for Rita and Natasha. How did you find the right outlets to pitch when it came to your bylined content? So I guess I can go first. So when we talk about Kiplinger, Kiplinger actually reached out to me and what I really liked about Kiplinger is they focus on wealth creation. Actually, Seeking Alpha did reach out to me and I respectfully declined, they kind of nudged me. And then when I wrote an article, I love what Natasha was saying, it's so important. Sometimes I think it's really important to say no. And I realized that that was not a good fit. Great publication, but not a great fit for the work I do. So I would say Kiplinger, they reached out to me, they liked what I said and it was a very collaborative approach. They give me ideas, sometimes I'll pitch ideas and it's that back and forth. So I think the first thing you need to think about is what topics are interesting to you and then what do you wanna be known for? And again, sometimes I remember I would say, oh my goodness, if I could just have one byline column, this would be great. And what will happen is when you get that one, just focus on that one and do the best job possible. And that will lead to other opportunities. The last thing I'll say is I want all of you, I really love what Natasha said about elevating other advisors. It's so important to have the abundance mentality, not scarcity. You don't want to just be a source. You want to be a trusted resource. And you can say, you know what? Thank you so much for thinking of me. I may not be the right person for this, but let me get you. And even if people are busy or can't respond at that time, the fact that you tried and told people, you know what, I may not be the right person. Thank you for thinking of me. Hey, here's some people who can help you. That is going to pay you dividends in the future and elevate everyone. Great advice. Natasha, anything to add? How do you find the right outlets? I think my experience is very similar to Margarita's. I didn't look for my byline opportunity. Actually, that's not true. I did have an article in Forbes. So that was something that I thought would be a good, durable place for just something that I hadn't seen before. So it was like some of my more original, not sort of topical content. Other than that, I have been approached. The byline I sort of have landed with is Globe and Mail. And I know that my target market reads the Globe and Mail. So it's highly worth my time. It's something I read myself. I consider it a pretty credible publication. And so that's sort of, if I'm going to write something, that's where I would spend my time. I've also written for Money Sense, the same reason. My target market reads Money Sense and it's a highly credible publication. So that is sort of where I've sort of landed in terms of my decision-making process. Some examples that I have perhaps said no to are opportunities that are read by not my target market, like the people that I'm trying to subtly repel. And so the topics don't necessarily appeal to me and or industry, like publications that are mostly for within the industry. Because I don't necessarily, like that's not my business. It doesn't really serve me to write for the industry necessarily. Though, I mean, occasionally I participate in industry-focused events, case in point, okay. But when it comes to writing, I typically am putting out content that focuses on my ideal client. All right. Thank you both. Marie also wanted me to point out, going back to the slide on news releases, that when you are building that list of journalists, Impact and other PR firms can help you build those lists. So we do manual curation and go out and find those local journalists within your area or other relevant journalists based on the type of content and publications you're trying to reach. And then also there is software designed to aid in that list creation. So if you're interested in learning more, feel free to reach out. But with that, let's move on to podcasts. So also same as videos, it's better for those of us who are better at speaking than writing. It's a great way to show your character and personality while also demonstrating expertise and building thought leadership. And just some ideas for how you can come up with ideas for podcasts. But you can cover different financial planning and wealth management topics, even delve more into the lifestyle side of things. It's helpful we can involve different team members and just get some different voices, different perspectives, things like that. And also invite expert guests to come on, some of your partners and COIs, people that you work with, people, other service providers in your area that some of your clients are also using. So a couple of examples here, this is Intentional Wealth, a podcast from an advisory firm in Pennsylvania. You can see their first episode here was on estate planning and they had an estate planning attorney come on and be the guest. And that estate planning attorney is also popular amongst their clients. And then their next episode was Medicare planning and so on and so forth. And so they bring on partners and COIs and other service providers that are popular within their area. And Wealth and Life podcast from Fidado Wealth also takes a similar approach. So you can see some of their example episodes down here at the bottom, bootstrapping ownership, estate planning, building a dream career. They have a few more episodes kind of like building a dream career that just speak more towards interesting topics and lifestyles. So I think that's a good formula whenever you can bring different guests and partners and COIs on your podcast is a great idea. And I recommend Zencastr. I love Zencastr for both podcasts and videos. It's an online platform where you can record both audio and video or just audio. It is cloud-based. Rather than go to meeting or Zoom, whereas if you're recording and your internet cuts out, your recording is also gonna cut out, Zencastr accesses your hard drive and it records the audio and video while you're recording to your machine. And then when you stop the recording, it uploads the audio and video to the cloud so that even if your internet cuts out during the recording process, it continues recording to your machine and has that hard file that it then uploads to their online platform at the end of the recording. And that also allows it to be really high quality audio and video. So check out Zencastr. And then I also love Libsyn for hosting audio and for the podcasting platform. That stands for liberated syndication. So in addition to giving you a nice profile page and a nice embedded player bar, like you see there for the intentional wealth player, that's a screenshot of the player bar from their website. So in addition to that, it syndicates your podcast out to some of the biggest podcast platforms out there like Apple and Spotify. So they just make it really easy to syndicate your podcast and get it out on all the different relevant platforms. This slide, production takes on a new meaning. So we're all producers or content now. We're all current content creators. We can become our own media publishers and content creators, and we don't really have to rely on publications or media outlets anymore to get our content out there. Obviously, when you can get a byline article placed in an industry publication or local publication or something like that, that provides a lot of value, but you don't have to rely on that in order to get your content out there. So for example, Impact, we produce a lot of our own content on our best practices blog on our website. For years, Marie has been doing these Swift chats, video chats with friends and thought leaders and people who we think have an interesting story in the industry. So here's a recent one with a couple of the executives from AdviseOn. And so she's been doing these video chats for years. And during the pandemic, where we weren't out at conferences as much and we were kind of lacking content that we would normally produce from attending events. And we also saw a bunch of competitors and other friends and people in the industry coming out with podcasts. And we were like, well, why don't we just take the audio from our videos and put it out as a podcast and just an audio form? So we set up Swift chats in the financial services industry podcast. And we pretty much just take the audio from these video chats and give people a different way to digest that content. And so, some people may see a 15 minute video and think, oh, I don't really have time to watch that, but maybe I'll listen to the podcast while I'm out walking my dog or folding laundry or whatever it may be. And then in addition to that, oh, here's the player bar from Libsyn. In addition to that, we also get our podcast transcribed, like I spoke about earlier. And then we put that transcription on the webpage with the video. And so not only do we have a great user experience by giving people choice and how they wanna digest it, how they wanna digest that content, but we're also getting that SEO value from getting all of that keyword rich text on the page. And so we record on Zencaster, we host our videos on Vimeo, we use Libsyn for our podcast platform, and we use Descript for transcription. So you can kind of see how that all plays hand in hand. And from this one conversation, we were able to get three really good pieces of content in terms of the video, the podcast, and the transcription, the written piece. And then we also chunked that out into multiple social media posts, email blasts, and so on and so forth. So from just one piece, one conversation, we were able to get so many good pieces of content that helped build out our online presence. And I know that it's kind of intimidating to get going on podcasts and videos. There's so much equipment and other things that you need to learn or know or outsource. So we put together this resource and equipment list for videos and podcasts that you can download on our website. So it has a list and links to where you can purchase microphones for all different kinds of settings, cameras, lighting, tripods, other equipment and accessories to help you accomplish better videos, podcasts, and webinars, some web-based tools and resources like Zencaster and Libsyn that I spoke on, some additional software, either free or cheap software, and so much more. So if you're interested in getting that resource and equipment list, you can download that at impactcommunications.org slash NAPFA. And just a couple other examples here. Make sure to check out Rita and Natasha's websites as well if you want good examples of how they're creating custom content. But Vedado Wealth, I showed off their podcast earlier. They have this learning center on their website where they feature their podcast. They have a video library. They have some longer form, formal articles, as well as some shorter form, more informal blog posts. They post webinar recordings. They even do retirement classes. So this learning center is a great resource for clients and prospects, provides a lot of really good ungated content, educational value, and just positions them as credible thought leaders. Intercontinental Wealth Advisors, they have on their insights page on their website, their news and media activity, blog posts, videos, webinars, and a special report. And so you can see how they're giving people a lot of choice with different educational content they can access. Holly Modasser of Stern's Financial, she has kind of gotten that halo effect that I talked about earlier and positioned herself as a celebrity within her community thanks to the Women on Top podcast and some of these books that she's written. And so she just looks larger in life thanks to some of this custom content she's producing that is very targeted. She has a niche with women, wealth, and social change. And so she's really positioned herself as the expert in those fields as a financial advisor in her area and within her community. And then Integrated Financial Group, they have gone the route of focusing on written content for producing their custom content. So here we see a bylined article in Wealth Management's Mid-Year Outlook issue, some profiles in Biz Women by the Business Journals, and Valiant CEO, a news release in the Associated Press announcing them as a top advisory firm in Atlanta. So they're really strong riders and they decided to go this route. And even within just written content, you can see articles, news releases, profiles, so many different avenues you can go to help position you as credible experts and also show voice and authenticity and help with SEO. And then Impact's content. So check out our blog for some of those SwiftChat videos and podcasts and other educational resources. But at Impact, we try to be our pro personal best and showcase a mix of expertise along with character and culture. So you can see a lot of these photos here that we post when we visit clients or go to conferences and events. We try to provide access to and a steady cadence of valuable, no strings attached, and undated custom content to provide value to the community and the industry, and also to draw the right people in while subtly repelling the wrong people. And we like to fill the internet with hyper-relevant custom content for our audiences. So with that, in summary, be your pro personal best to attract right fit clients and strategic partners. Show your personality, character, and culture. And remember that people do business with people they like and trust. Provide access to valuable content without constraints to build trust and draw people in. Don't just put your best stuff behind a gated form. You'll remember earlier in the year, we talked about gated lead magnets. And while that is important, most of your content should be ungated and just truly provide value to your audience and position you as a helpful expert. And three, fill the internet with a steady stream of custom content to build SEO and a strong online presence, authority, and thought leadership, and remember people first and spiders second. So Q&A and reminders. I think we might have time for a couple questions here at the end, but let's just get through this really quick. November 2nd's gonna be that live feedback class where we do kind of a Q&A show and tell. So bring your content examples, create a first draft of a piece of content, whether you write the first draft of a blog post, or even if you just have an idea, an idea for a podcast and you want our take and our opinion on it, if that's a good idea. So feel free to bring any ideas or drafts that you may have and watch for a participation survey coming soon where you can kind of let us know if you're planning to participate or bring a piece of content that we can review. And we'll have more info on next year's Masterclass series soon. And as always, tune into the Mindset Mastery Podcast. We have a new episode upcoming this Monday. And as Heidi mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, NAFTA Fall Conference coming up October 20th through 22nd. So I know we are coming up to the top of the hour here. Marie, do we have any other questions, pressing questions from the audience? No other questions today. And I think in order to end on time, we should just put a peg in it and come back next time. Perfect. We'll see you all then. Thank you.

custom content

thought leadership

ideal clients

articles

videos

podcasts

trust building

target audience

content creation