How To Power A Successful Blog Through Storytelling With Jeff Bullas [AMP 084]
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- Storytelling: If people forget what you told them, they won’t forget how you made them feel
- Marketers in different countries face the same problems; they all want more traffic and conversions
- How Jeff took a $10 investment to generate more than 25 million visitors
- Books and blogs that inspired Jeff
- Build credibility and create content
- Description of Jeff’s virtual team; how he avoids the office because it feels like work instead of fun
- Make your brand memorable
- Connection between storytelling, social media, and driving traffic to your blog
- Make your audience the hero of a journey; convince people that they are capable
- With traffic, you have to earn and own it to convert it to leads and sales
- Passion and purpose is not a destination, it’s a calling and journey
- Develop a daily routine that becomes a habit
- Where to start: Ask yourself, Why am I here? What’s my passionate purpose?
- Jeff Bullas Website
- Jeff Bullas’ Blog
- Jeff Bullas on Twitter
- Jeff Bullas on YouTube
- The New Rules of Marketing and PR book
- Jeremy Epstein’s blog
- Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek book
- HubSpot Blog
- Deep Work book
- Building a StoryBrand book
- Todd Brown and Marketing Funnel Automation
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- AMP on iTunes - leave a review and send screenshot to podcast@coschedule.com
- “The reality is that it’s your story and that’s where it starts to become powerful...”
- “This is still very driven by what I'm passionate about, which is making a difference, creating content, learning to write better, learning to tell better stories...”
- “If you love what you're doing,... that will make it so much easily to actually sit down and create content, inspire, entertain, and educate, that's what’s really important.”
How To Power A Successful Blog Through Storytelling With @jeffbullas
Click To TweetTranscript:
Jordan: What's the linchpin of driving traffic to your blog and how do you move from chasing an audience to attracting and then keeping one? Well, today's guest has some great answers to these questions and he's a real world case study of doing exactly this because today, we've got Jeff Bullas on the show. Jeff is an internationally-renowned speaker on digital marketing including social media, blogging, and so many more topics. He's been featured on Forbes as a top 20 influencer of chief marketing officers for 2018. He's included on entrepreneur.com as one of the 50 online marketing influencers to watch in 2018. Listed on Forbes as one of the top 20 influencers of CMOs in 2017 and so many more recognitions that are well-deserved because of a serious marketing expertise but best of all about Jeff is his mission is to help people win at business, in life, in a digital world. Today's conversation certainly helps him fulfill that. I'm Jordan with CoSchedule. Now here is Jeff Bullas. Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show today. Jeff: It’s an absolute pleasure and great to meet you and we’ve already had a few stories behind the scenes which we won't tell anyone about but that’s fine. Jordan: We’ve had some very secret conversations and we’ll see what kind of forays we make in the rest of this interview. Jeff: Men secret business, I call it. Jordan: That would be your next book coming out but I don’t want to ruin it with any spoilers. Can you kick us off by telling us more about what you’re up to these days? What countries you’ve been jetting off to, and all the exciting adventures of Jeff Bullas? Jeff: Over last years or so we've been to Norway. We've been to San Francisco a few times. We've been to other parts of Americas–Spokane and Seattle. We've been to Portugal. We're about to head off to Jordan. We’re back to head off to Bucharest, Romania. Then, we're thinking going to Stockholm. It’s been great to actually just meet some fabulous people around the world that have a passion similar to me, had great companies in a digital world, and had business life in the digital world as well, because I'm really serious they believe that. Life and business should not be separate, it shouldn’t be go to work, hate what you do, come back at 5:00 and find your life again. I really believe that in this digital world it's possible to have it all as they say. We're doubling down on a publishing, so we got some projects based on that. We're writing a lot more long-form content. We're working with some big brands on influence on marketing like sales force and ensured, so a lot of interesting stuff happening. I suppose a lot of my passion submerged more over the last couple of years is the storytelling in getting your message across to the world and have brands that can do that, whether you're a personal brand or bigger brand, because I love the quote. "People forget what you told them, but they don’t forget how you made them feel and that's very much what a story does." Jordan: Fantastic. I love talking to people like you too who are all over and you sort of have a bird’s eye view of the digital marketing world, and the content marketing world. Something I wonder is do you find that marketers face the same problems even when they're in the different countries? When you go see the marketers in Jordan, and you go to Bucharest, and all of these other places, are they the same core problems we’re all having? Jeff: Yes, they want more traffic. They want more conversions. The reality is still the same, it's just quite often that might not have the same platforms locally. In other words Facebook might be big in one country and not quite as big in another or Twitter is really great in one part of the world, and not so great in another. It varies. But, essentially, the foundation and your strategy shouldn’t be much different. Jordan: This is a great topic today for our interview with that question, because I really wanted to dig into traffic with you. That’s something that you are an expert in and not just before you talk a lot about it, but because you've done it. That’s what makes me excited to talk about this with you today, because if I've got your stories straight, you took a $10 investment, you started it 10 bucks, and now you had over 25,000,000 visitors. You have a powerhouse of a brand and you found success as an entrepreneur. Can you just take us back and give as the cliff notes like how did you go from $10 to where you at today? Jeff: It started as a little passion project. I was going out with a lady at that time and she introduced me to Facebook in 2008 and I went, "Wow." This intersection of humanity and technology which is what social media is about, enabling people to publish. I noticed people's obsession with it and then I got into to Twitter, I went with the same type of attitude, and I went an approach and I went, "Wow," this opens up the world to me and to anyone that actually has something to say or very little to say, because we often start with not knowing much about our topic or what have I got to say that hasn’t been said before. This obsession with social media became my obsession as well. Part of it was driven by a book by David Meerman Scott, The New Rules of Marketing and PR. David talked about how content could attract an audience and I went, “Wow, that sounds good,” because I've been so used to chasing at audience. There's a quote used by Jeremy Epstein in his which I just came across the other day, which is really fabulous. He sums it up beautifully. He said, “Sales is where you call them, marketing is where they call you." Jordan: That’s good. Jeff: I went, “Wow,” because David’s book was very much about creating content and attracting an audience, inbound marketing and we call that today generally around the world as content marketing. Then, I read Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek book around the same time but I went, “Wow, this digital world is offering this opportunity to be free of geographical constraints." Free of working 9:00 to 5:00, that really attracted me as well with that sort of mindset. Then, I read a blog post by HubSpot which said, "Do you have an inkling of what you want to start a business or you want to write about start a blog?" I don’t even know what a blog was. Actually, I think I had Google what a blog was back then. Jordan: Yes, it's awesome. Jeff: Blogs were just for geeky people and I wasn’t a geeky person. I work in tech for a couple of decades and I’d have to adapt and evolve for decades as well. In 2009, March, I actually started the blog and I just brought the domain name which is the $10 investment. I'm doing Twitter by then and I realized, "I need to do two things. I need to create the content and then I also need an audience." I got really obsessed with building that audience. Twitter became my go-to platform, Facebook was sort of there, there was no advertising at that time. Because I had no money, I had to be creative and even inventive. I discovered that Twitter was pretty a cool way to actually get some attentions. Then, we got put on list of Social Media Examiners as one of the top 10 finalist or something of social media blogs in the planet, and started building a little bit of credibility, and just kept creating content. It was just a passion project and I was actually between jobs, that’s the code for unemployed, and what was really interesting was I actually got a job on April 1, which is Fool's Day. I don’t if that’s the same in America. April 1 is Fool's Day pretty right around the world. I got the job but I've already started the blog and what was interesting was I had to create content, so I did time blocking. I write late at night and I discovered that couldn't work because you go out for dinner and you meet new friends, you have a couple of glass of wine, you come back, "Oh, I got to write." That wasn't going to work. Jordan: Things get pretty interesting. Jeff: Exactly, so I started writing but what was fantastic about writing at night is I could see the world wake up, because I was a bit of night owl. At 11:00 PM, America is actually is waking up and my audience was primarily and still today is mainly USA and North America, about 40% of my traffic is from there. It was interesting, because I would end up having conversations on Twitter with people as they got online. That was really fascinating. Essentially, this passion project escaped the lab. I was working for this digital agency and I started speaking around the world as the bog grew. I went to Italy. I went to Kuwait. I went to Beirut. I went to Istanbul. I was taking leave without pay and they get, "Well, you're not just interested in growing our business because you're so distracted by your own blog." I'm like, "I can't, but I really need a job." They actually cut me down to three days a week, cut me down to two days a week, and about four years after I started, I got myself slowly fired from my day job. In the meantime, I was creating content. I changed my habit of doing deep work, it’s a great book by Cal Newport. I'm recommending anyone to read that. He actually gave a name to what I was doing, it's deep work, which I got up at 4:30 AM for four years, and actually wrote from 4:30 AM to 9:00 AM before I started my day job, and wrote, and created, and published, and shared. Eventually, I got myself fired from my job. Actually, they contracted me back for a day/week and that was about four years ago. Today, that business actually has folded and we're booming here. Passion project escaped the lab essentially to make long story short. Jordan: That’s the best way to describe, a passion project escaped the lab. I'm going to steal that from you, that’s good. What does your team look like today now? I understand it’s not just you in the lab anymore, so who are the scientists with you? Jeff: I’ve got SEO guru in Europe. I've got my marketing funnels expert, she works in Colorado in USA. I've got my editor, he works actually in Sydney, but in different location. That’s about it really. I'm just thinking if anyone is hiding behind the scenes. I also have web designer/developer, he’s in Melbourne. Then we got different contractors in the [...] copywriting and so on. Essentially, I just got a core team, it's a virtual team. I do have an office, but I don’t go there very often because when I go to the office, it feels like I'm working whereas if I have my home office where we're in today, it feels like I'm just playing which is really what I'm doing. This is still very driven by what I'm passionate about, which is making a difference, creating content, learning to write better, learning to tell better stories, and hopefully people will actually want to hear and maybe pay business for doing some of that, which I do. It’s a lot of fun. I really don't feel like I'm working. This is not a job. This is still a passion project.![](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Quote2-01.png?w=3840&q=75)
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