31:2 Overcoming the content block

Lee Matthew Jackson: Welcome to a conversation with me, Mr. Lee Matthew Jackson and today we have on the show the one, the only back for the umpteenth time. It’s Mr. Martin Huntbach. How are you today?

Martin Huntbach: Good. Thanks so much for having me on. I missed it. I get withdrawal symptoms when I don’t come on here you know, every few months.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I know the feeling mate I’m on it every single week though to be honest. So you know, I’m just addicted.

Martin Huntbach: You’re a rock star.

Lee Matthew Jackson: It’s really good to have you on. Folks, if you don’t know who Martin is, then please do check out the show notes because we will link to all of the wonderful things that Martin gets involved in, including previous episodes that he’s been on. Also he has spoken on our stage Agency Transformation Live of 2019 and is returning or with his wife Lyndsay for 2020 as well. Martin do you mind just giving us a very quick bio of yourself and then we’ll get stuck into overcoming our content blocks?

Martin Huntbach: Yeah. So thanks so much for inviting us back on the stages that you owe next year. It’s going to be really interesting. So yeah, we run Jammy Digital, which is a WordPress web design agency, but we generally help any kind of businesses. Our speciality really is in creating websites that are content driven. So we help our clients mainly with strategy, how to create better content for the website, how to get more traffic, that kind of thing. So that’s kind of our passion really is making sure that yeah, the website looks good and works. But you know, from a content approach your websites, once it’s built, it’s not done. You have to have a strategy and that’s what we that’s what we talk about quite a lot.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons why we’re having this episode today. One of the biggest comments I am getting from our community, from agency owners is all around content creation, how to create, et cetera. So as you are in my humble opinion, one of the leading content experts, especially of the written word, what would you say are some of those common blockers that stop people from actually creating content?

Martin Huntbach: There’s so many, I think actually getting started on this journey is quite a difficult one. I mean, I, I’ll be honest with you, I am not a good writer by an extra to the imagination or I’ve never classed myself as a good writer.

Lee Matthew Jackson: You have a secret weapon.

Martin Huntbach: Well that stopped me. You know, I always thought, well Lyndsay’s the writer, I’ll come up with the ideas, maybe she can write the content. But actually I had my own voice. I had my own, you know, my language is different from Lyndsay’s and I wanted it to be my own. So it was a struggle getting started. But actually when I did get started, I fell in love with it and I think it’s something that most people do. Some people just say, I’m not a writer or I’m not good at video or I’m not a talker, I could never do a podcast. But actually if you just get started, then you find that if you’ve got a deadline, you give yourself some constraints, then it can actually turn into a real passion and it definitely does of mine. So there’s so many constraints. Mindset is one of the biggest ones, but actually with something more tangible. I think things like white paper syndrome, maybe you’re not sure what to write. That’s a big issue, I think we’ve all struggled with that. You sit down, you know, you need to write a piece of content and you’re just not sure what to write and you end up wasting time and you think, why am I wasting my time doing this when I should be focusing on client work? And you let all of that mindset stuff get in the way. So it does matter. Things like not having a strategy, you know, not knowing what to write. That’s a major issue. And then that’s why so many agencies just write what I like to call fluff content, which is just filler content so that you’ve got a recent post on your blog page so that people don’t think that you’ve vanished and we’re just going to stick something on there for November and hopefully people, you know, that’ll drive some traffic and this, that and the other. But that kind of content is always really weak.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I’m really guilty of that actually. So the sort of fluff content I’ll have done is like how to do something really dull and boring that my clients really don’t really want to know or care about. You know, like it might be a bit of CSS or it might be something. Then eventually I got so lazy that I actually just started changing the dates of my blog posts so it looked like it was recent.

Martin Huntbach: That’s like the ultimate busy trick. I’m so busy. What can I do? Change the days. That’s covered me for another 30 days. Yeah, it’s a real problem. But the only way that you know, we go over that hurdle was by having constraints and having deadlines and we actually joined a content challenge where we kept up to date every week with a piece of content that really helped as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, that’s good.

Martin Huntbach: But I mean for you, for instance, you’ve been doing this podcast for years, you must’ve come up against some resistance over the years as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well, I mean some of the blockers for me, the main thing has always been getting stuck for ideas, trying to work out what it is to do. But also you’re completely right with regards to the mindset. So I actually put off this podcast for about a year because I didn’t have that confidence and every time I started planning it I would say to myself, right, I’m going to launch this in, you know, in a month. It’s going to get launched in a month and I’ll start planning it and I’ve got all these old notebooks I can find with old notes about the podcast and what I’m going to do, etc. But my self confidence would always hold me back and it was actually very early, if you listen to very early episodes with Sarah Moore, it was actually Sarah Moore that had a conversation with me and said, you will not launch unless you tell people you’re going to i.e be accountable to the public. I was involved in communities and people knew who I was as a nice helpful guy. So I posted out in multiple groups saying, Hey, I am launching a podcast and it goes live in 30 days. Then on social media I did a count down every single day to the day of my podcast launching. It was actually only a couple of days before I actually started recording the episodes. I was like, Oh crap, I actually have to do this now. Then obviously the rest is history. Four years later we absolutely are still here, but it’s that self critical element of us. You know you mentioned the white paper syndrome. Not only do you struggle to know what to write, but then when you start to write, we are so self critical aren’t we? It’s ridiculous. You like, you write your first line and then you’re like deleting it. Oh no, no, no, no, that sounds so crap and when I’m on the podcast like I am now and somebody asks me a question or I ask them a question or I’m not sure what to say at a certain point because my self confidence dips a little bit and I think, Oh, I don’t know enough. This person’s really clever. I think I sound like an idiot and then when other people then edit this show later on, they’re like, Oh, that was really good. I really loved what you said. And I’m like, are you serious? I felt like an idiot. I thought that was a dumb thing to say. I thought that was just totally obvious.

Martin Huntbach: Honestly, I think everybody struggles with that. You’re never going to get out of this self editing mode. You know, you edit as you go you’re self critical and sometimes that can stop you in your tracks straight away. It’s a real problem and I mean I remember being, when I first started writing content early 2017 when I really got into the flow of it, every post that I wrote, I questioned every word, every line, everything I ever wrote. I had got to the point where to overcompensate I’d just write more so because I was worried about the points I was making and somebody could argue this and somebody could argue against that. I just ended up going more and more in depth and then before I know it, I’d been writing content every week, really, really struggling because it took me hours and that was every Sunday, which was the deadline we gave ourselves. I was asking Lyndsay, Lyndsay, can you check this post? Can you edit it for me? And she’d get really frustrated cause I’d always leave it to the Sunday and when we started sharing it, people loved it. They love that we went really in depth. They loved the fact that we weren’t relying on our arrogance and the fact that we had all the answers and we could just share it in a 500 word blog post. I wanted the understanding to be there, I wanted every single person on my what level that they were out to be able to consume it and I just focused so much time and effort that I felt like I did. I gave up, you know, my Sunday. Sometimes it felt like that, but then when I lifted my head up after I’d written all this content, everyone started to see us as experts and all we were doing was answering questions and going through the general stuff that we go through talking about our internal processes, what would it cost for you to get a website? How long will it take? You know, we focus 100% on our end customer rather than focused on, Oh, that agency over there is writing about their recent award and that agency over there is writing about you know, GDPR, like who cares about that stuff?

Lee Matthew Jackson: Oh mate, come on. I wrote a blog on that and that’s not fair. I even recorded an episode on it.

Martin Huntbach: That’s when you know you’ve put in your mouth.

Lee Matthew Jackson: But I also then did a podcast episode once when we moved office, we have moved. I’m like, what can I write about? Oh we have moved.

Martin Huntbach: It happens. It does, but it happens all the time and it’s fine. You know, you understand the value if you’re that you understand the value in adding existing, I didn’t content to an existing site keeping it up to date and that’s a great place to start when it comes to having a strategy, knowing that that is important is enough to get you off the starting block to just change your direction and pivot slightly with a strategy.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Now knowing that it’s important, it is great but people do get stuck for ideas and I love how you guys frame it. The white paper syndrome, that gives me a vision of either being sat with a notebook or at the typewriter, my dad used to have a typewriter so that just takes me back. Or just looking at an empty blog post in word. When you go into that non distraction mode and it fills your screen and then what the hell do you write? So my question is for you, could you share with us some sources of inspiration for creating content? How can an agency owner who’s listening right now who understands that there is importance in content, how can they come up with some ideas that are better than we have moved or were attending such and such exhibition.

Martin Huntbach: Okay, so what we advise people to do now is not what I did when I first started. However, I still think there’s that extreme value in what I did and hopefully that’s going to work for a lot of people as well. So what I did is every single time I got an idea for a piece of content, I would click on a shortcut to Google docs, which I’ve gotten my bookmarks. I’d click on it, I’d write the title of the post if I got an idea and then if I thought to myself, great, that’s the idea. Maybe it’s why we build WordPress to why we use WordPress to build your website. Then as quickly, no matter what I was doing, I’d stop doing everything and I would hammer out five bullet points and then I would stop. I would put that away, I would close that file the next time I come up with an idea or I’d open a new one and it was as quickly as two clicks, click on docs in my bookmarks open a new one, give it a title, give it a short whatever’s in my head at the minute. What might the bullet points look like? What might the chapters of this, if this was a book, what would the chapters look like? Might only be two or three bullet points. Then when it came to having this challenge, when it came to, okay, I needed to write a piece of content every single week, then I already had these little files that were already there and it was strong enough to stop me what I was doing when I was busy. So it should be good enough to write when I’ve got my free time to write. So that was one thing. But you asked how to come up with the ideas. A lot of people might be struggling, they might not have those ideas. So that habit needs to happen. You have to get into the habit of recognising when a blog posts idea or a podcast episode or a YouTube video it hits and then document it quickly cause you won’t remember. So getting the ideas comes from running our business. You know, that’s why people have to keep one foot in the door if they’re still writing about content, even if they’re not doing the day to day activity, you need to stay in the mix. You need to keep your head in the game otherwise the contents not going to be relevant enough. So what we do is every single question that we get asked, we consider whether or not that would make a good blog post.

Martin Huntbach: A great book for this, which I spoke about on stage, is ‘They ask you answer’ by Marcus Sheridan. He speaks about how any business can create a load of traffic and help your customers based on answering questions that people ask you. There’s a bigger strategy behind it. But that was, you know, that’s good enough as a strategy sometimes. Now, one of the hidden things that we do is we really don’t like it when projects don’t go according to plan. So for instance, everybody’s had a client where for some reason they started as a great client and then it veered off track. Now why did it veer off track? What happened? How can you get on more of your ideal customers and less of that happening? So we then started answering or creating content based on frustrations. Now, not from a negative point of view, we wanted this to be helpful. So for instance, why your website might fail. So we had a customer who just expected that when they paid for a website that it was just going to work. Why am I not getting customers through? Why this? Why that? Well, there’s lots of reasons. Maybe you’re not sharing on social media. Maybe you’re not writing content. Maybe you’ve not got any paid advertising, depending on what business you are in. We wanted to safeguard the fact that just because you’re paying us thousands of pounds for a website, it does not guarantee success. Here’s is why your website’s still might fail after you invest money with us. Now that is like 100% an empathetic post to say, listen, I do not want you to give me all your money and expect that your website is going to start throwing money out of the screen. It’s not. So a lot of our posts came from frustration and discussions like that with clients where they’re like, well, I’m expecting my sales, what’s happening? So we decided to create a post to say this is exactly what you need to do after it. We just positioned it slightly different. We got sick of people, you know, trying to convince people that they needed to show pictures of themselves on their website rather than have that conversation every single time we created a blog post about it up front so that people actually consume that content before they get in touch so that we didn’t have to waste time. So we’ve just eliminated a lot of the discussions that we have to have with clients. By the time they get to speak to us because of all of this content, by the time they speak to us they’re all well equipped. They know exactly what we charge, they know exactly the process, they know exactly why they need the pictures on their website. We created, and we spoke about this on stage, we created what we call a content fortress. Every piece of content is a building block to build your fortress around your business so you can protect yourself, protect yourself mentally as well as physically. It just becomes, you know, a business that only attracts the ideal customers cause everybody else will filter themselves out. If they don’t want to invest thousands in a website and you’ve written a blog post about why they should, they’re never going to get in touch and waste your time. You’re never going to waste your time creating a proposal for them. That’ll take you an hour or so and then you just end up attracting more of your ideal customers and then everybody else just fades away. So I think that’s how we come up with content. But we do have a very specific approach to creating content when we advised now, and this is the information that we go through quite a lot with our coaching and consulting clients, but I mean for me, that’s how we come up with ideas. But again, you’ve done how many episodes now?

Lee Matthew Jackson: 200 and something.

Martin Huntbach: 200 and something like that baffles me. I mean what do you do to, cause it’s every single week, it’s consistent. You have it like an appointment in the diary. It’s like a military operation. Where do you get your ideas from?

Lee Matthew Jackson: Sure. So, well, I mean I’m lucky I’ve got a community, so that’s where pretty much most of our ideas come from and I listened to what’s going on. So when we launched the podcast four years ago, at the same time I launched a Facebook group and didn’t really talk much about it for the first few episodes and then just started to promote it and people started to trickle in. So four years later we’re at I think 3,100 members, which is wonderful. It’s a great source of consistent ideas. I can see what’s really, really important to people. That’s why we’re doing this. That’s why we’re doing this episode. That’s why we’re doing our event that me and you will talk about later as well because one of the biggest issues that people are having is around content marketing and creating content. But equally there’s been all sorts of topics that I’ve heard people discuss. I’ve seen comments, people have tagged me in posts, et cetera, you know, you name it, mental health, how much do I price, et cetera. A lot of these I don’t necessarily know the answer to as well, which is the great thing about running this podcast cause it means I can go and find those experts who do. You know, I can reach out to WP&UP and have them on the show soon, which is phenomenal. We’re going to be talking about mental health. I can reach out to Matt and talk about funnels, I can get you on and talk about that content castle and, and, and things for inspiration. So for me, that’s essentially what spurred me on. Now I have as well done quite a few solo episodes as well and that is really to, I guess elevate my own brand as well as to help people get to know me and to show that I do know my stuff. I’m not just grabbing onto other people and riding their coattails, but actually you asked me a question, I can probably give you a pretty good answer based on some experiences. So that’s what I’ve been using as well. If you check out the episodes, folks there’s quite a few solo episodes in there as well. We’ve got a premium community that we also put content in every single week, like you said, like clockwork. So I will create presentations every single week and documentation, et cetera, on very specific subjects that people are interested in. Again, it could be things like project management or how to handle Facebook ads, how to build your audience. All those things as well. So very, very lucky because I’m, I’m plugged in, so I’d say if you don’t have your own community, you can still do this if you are involved, at least in other people’s communities.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So what niche are you in? Go and join those Facebook groups. I mean I would say LinkedIn groups, but whenever I go into them they’re like tumbleweed. So wherever your target audience is, go hang out with them. What are the questions that they are asking, and also very much echoing what you said is look in your inbox, and I mean you didn’t say quite that, but you were essentially saying, what is it that your clients are asking you? So what are your clients asking you? There are great, great source. I always look in my inbox, I look at projects and see what questions came up in projects or what problems happened during projects as well. Then they become the inspiration for an episode of the podcast or the YouTube channel or for something that’s going to be inside of the premium community. So really keeping it to the ground and I will echo what you said about coming up with a title and putting down a few bullet points because that’s essentially going to be the blog post or the episode or the presentation or the video or whatever it is you’re going to make. It works for all of them because you’ve got your title and you’ve got the five points that you want to say or the three points that you want to make. Filling in those gaps then just becomes incredibly easy

Martin Huntbach: Absolutely. You’re right on what you touched on there, and we always said that we owe our success to two things, content and community. We’ve set that for so long and just based on what you’ve said then it still gives me goosebumps because it’s so easy for anybody to place themselves. I mean I’m in the community and the call your premium community and the quality of the day was about networking. The amount of content ideas I got from networking events that I went to years ago was incredible. I just never acted on them until a lot later. So yeah, you do get a lot of amazing ideas from community as well that might be online communities or in person communities. You get questions all the time, why am I not ranking in Google? How can I take payments on my website without it costing me a fortune? Like all of these are, they’re just everywhere. But you have to open your mind to it rather than you just answer the question and be seen as an expert in that split second.

Lee Matthew Jackson: And write them down.

Martin Huntbach: Exactly. So it works wonders. So I’m interested to know, obviously, because you with new content so much more than we haven’t so much longer, what’s your best content creation?

Lee Matthew Jackson: I would say recording audio is definitely the best content creation. Actually. Let me explain that. So step one, take Martin’s advice, write the title and write your bullet points. Then what you can do is record yourself speaking them back. This is what I do for a lot of blog posts that I create. I’m also doing it for my book. So I’m writing a book right now and I’ve outlined the entire book, every single chapter, every single section of each chapter. What I’ll then do is I will sit there and essentially ask myself imaginary the question of that particular bullet point and then I’ll answer it verbally. So if you think about when you’re in a meeting for example, and a client says to you, Oh, this is fantastic so how would we be able to save money on our payment gateway? Say that was the question that they asked. I guarantee you that you’ll probably gonna answer in about 200 to 500 words and hardly even think about it because the answer will just pour out from you verbally. So that’s exactly how I approached my initial content creation. I will verbally share my thoughts and opinions and then I will send it off over to rev.com and have it transcribed so that I’ve got a whole load of text in front of me that I can now edit and sort out and cleanup and take bits out, etc. But that allows me to share all the points I have in my head quickly rather than overthinking i and then I’ll do the edit process afterwards. If I’m going to do say a long video recording, what I will do is I am very happy to jump cut that. So if I’ve got a long form video content to create, I will again break out all my bullets and then I’ll talk on each one and I’ll jump cut it. So if I making mistake halfway through, I’ll also jump cut that bit out as well because great is better than perfect and as long as I’m putting the key messages across then that is, is definitely what I’ll do. So using the bullet point structure and then talking on it and getting it transcribed and then editing.

Martin Huntbach: I love that. I love the fact that you probably just get your phone on record and just get down the ideas. I mean, even if you’re on a phone call with a client and they ask you a question and you’re like, actually I’m going to answer this now and I’m just going to hit record on my phone just so I can recall at the onset you’re going to answer anyway so you are saving yourself twice as much of the time. So that’s a really good tip.

Lee Matthew Jackson: We’ve actually recorded meetings on that as well. So sometimes when we’re in a meeting and it’s a particular subject, we’ll say, Hey, can we record this meeting because we might use some of the content later and then I’ll go back to an answer I gave and it’s a 500 word blog post. I’m like, Holy crap, that was amazing. I’m clever.

Martin Huntbach: The jump cuts, it scares people being on video. They’re like, how can’t get guy could never get it as perfect as lead. But actually you’ve just explained that it’s never perfect. You just edit it out afterwards, which is a big relief for a lot of people. So no, that’s a really good point.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I’ve never done a full, but I think one of the videos I managed to do recently all the way through without the need of any job cuts, but pretty much most of the videos on there, it’s just me, tonnes of mistakes stopping starting over, answering the same 0.3 times until I’m happy with it. And then I just edit it all down at the end.

Martin Huntbach: I consistency and that approach and that kind of drive to continuously focus on content must have led to some great results, I’m guessing.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Absolutely. Well, do you want me to share some absolutely right. So, well obviously this podcast is immense. So we are currently, we’re hitting over 12,000 downloads now of the podcast every single month. We’re putting out four episodes as well, so you can do the math. We’re getting a significant listenership and the Facebook group has grown significantly. So we’re looking at 3,100 members. We launched our YouTube channel a little while back and we only really started taking it seriously a few months ago. So from just say a hundred subscribers because of the back of the group and of the podcast, we’ve already gone over 750 or so subscribers on our YouTube channel, which doesn’t, I guess sound a lot. But if we think about our 750 agency owners, that’s 750 of my target audience who are listening to me or watching me on a regular basis, and that’s phenomenal because I’ve, I am growing this brand and they are learning to know, like, and trust me. As a result, obviously we’ve got the premium membership, but more importantly for us and where we’re going over the next few months and years now is we’ve been able to launch the Agency Transformation movement where we have this event every single year that people will come to and that was phenomenally successful. It’s creating a whole conversation, you know, around what’s important in your agency, helping people understand their identity, their value, building their platform as an agency and then scaling and growing their business. So it’s, it’s just been a phenomenal platform for us and it’s led to so many opportunities. I can’t tell you right now what’s planned for 2020 but we have something that’s insanely huge planned and that again is only as a result of us stepping out of our comfort zone, showing up and starting to create regular content. Just on the plain boring side even if none of that had of ever happened, we would still be getting new opportunities every single week, which we still do in our inbox of somebody who’s listened to the podcast and they want to work with us or they want to recommend someone to us because they are aware that we build WordPress websites based off designs by designers. It’s a message that they hear all the time and it’s very easy for them to make that introduction, so just by showing up, it’s been insane. All of our websites get tonnes of visits. I can’t believe it really, to be honest, mate, when I look back.

Martin Huntbach: You’ve done really well and that consistency and that drive is just phenomenal, so I’m not worthy.

Lee Matthew Jackson: It’s been a surprise aww. It’s been a shock. Honestly. First, there was no real strategy at all. That has obviously evolved a strategy because I realised it was working. So, you know, I was just making it up as I went along initially. Then things evolved and things have catapulted. But I mean if we think about my original blog post, my original content was getting maybe 50 visits or 50 lessons a month four years ago and there was a few people trickling into the Facebook group and now, yeah, it’s insane. Incredible. How about you? I mean you guys have had all sorts going on. Right folks, I’m also gonna put a couple of links. There’s two of my favourite ever blog posts on the planet. I’m not going to spoil it, but check the show notes later and go and check out Jammy Digital’s website. There’s two blog posts you really need to read, which I think are really clever and phenomenal and I remember they both went viral anyway. So for you guys, what’s been the impact on your business and what opportunities as afforded?

Martin Huntbach: Well, there’s kind of like you say this there’s is the kind of tangible stuff. There’s the traffic. So we increased our traffic by 10 times in the space of 12 months from having a very specific drive and consistency that which is great, but traffic isn’t money, you know? But they do lead to which is great. So there’s traffic and leads and numbers and all that kind of stuff that’s good. But actually from a life changing point of view there are so many things that have happened. So we just got immensely confident in our product because people were responded so well to our content and our dedication to content. So we had people telling us that we’re not pricing ourselves high enough, so we need to increase our prices. Then we started to believe that our work was good enough and our content was good enough. None of this would’ve happened without starting to write that very first post. So we’ve increased our prices by four or 500% since then. I mean it’s laughable when you look at the prices that we were charging when we were on the phone trying to convince people that we were the agency for them. We had nothing to show for it. We didn’t have a fortress of content to impress anybody. So since we did that, people have started seeking us out and another massive benefits because we have our strategy because we tried to touch on the sensitive topics about building a website, about price, about how to build a successful website about how to avoid it failing. People have consumed an awful lot of content before they get in touch, which means they’re only getting in touch to get a final price offers. You know, we have people getting in touch to say we know we’re ready to use you, we’ve been wanting to use you for a while. We’ve been talking about it internally and we’re ready to push the button now. We had somebody recently who took, you know, he basically contacted and saying, you’ve never heard of me before, but we’d like to move forward please and that was it. That was it. And I’m like, we haven’t even given you a price, like what? What’s going on? So that’s amazing. You know, having people wanting to sign the proposal before you even spoke to them, and it’s just unbelievable. But one of the best things that we do now is we save an awful lot of time, we generally only speak to people who are ready to buy from us, which means 80 to 90% of our proposals go to business. It’s just, it’s very rare that we write a proposal unless we’re guaranteed the money. Honestly, it’s at that point where people don’t even know the intricacies of what we do on like what they get on a proposal, but they’re automatically ready to sign and send you money. It’s just bizarre to me. But when you look back at the agency that I used to run, and the fact that I used to spend an hour to two hours on the phone with everybody and then they’d say we’re shopping around and it was just a massive waste of time. You never knew if you were going to get that time back. But now it’s just so much simpler knowing that every most inquiries that come through, unless they are completely, they’re not read a single thing. You know, some people might just pick up the phone and say, do you do websites? But you know, that’s like one in a hundred people might do that. But everyone else has been through our content, they’ve seen things, they’ve got a little bit more of a knowledge about who we are and it just makes our business such a pleasurable business to run. We just don’t have that many issues anymore with clients because they understand how we work and we put enough content out there to showcase that.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s phenomenal and there is nothing worse than hearing someone saying we’re going to a few agencies and then they start giving you their that brief and asking you how much that would be on the phone. I’ve had that quite a lot. Right folks, well we are coming in to land. We have unpacked some blockers, so that’s some blockers for you creating content. We’ve discussed how you can get inspiration for content that will resonate with your audience. For example, looking in your inbox, talking with your clients, building community, or being part of community to help you build that content castle. We’ve talked about content creation hacks, so how we both create things. I love Martin’s idea of every time you come up with an idea, open up a document, write down a title, it can be a working title it doesn’t have to be the final title, but just write something down and get the core points down as bullets so that you can come back to that and create something magical later. We’ve also shared with you some of the incredible benefits that this good content marketing has given us that’s both that Martin attracting the right type of clients with Lyndsay, that’s people who are already educated as to how they can work with them, et cetera. And then also for my side, which has grown a massive audience. It delivers opportunities on a weekly basis as well as crazy opportunities to speak all around the world, which has been insane. Now me, Martin and Lyndsay we love content. You are listening to some content that we’ve just created together. However, we are all joining forces to launch a brand new in-person workshop in Manchester on Thursday the 6th of February. Martin, can you tell us all about our crazy cool plan.

Martin Huntbach: It’s so exciting. Yeah, this is kind of getting me really excited to get Christmas out of the way, which I never thought I’d say I can’t wait. It’s going to be phenomenal because you know we have such a different verse, such a different journey with content that it’s nice that we can join forces and actually teach people how to do this. So it’s going to be very different from kind of like a conference or like a free event because you know we’re charging for this, it’s not a big budget but we want to make sure that we give you lots and lots of tangible things that you can do and take away in your agency. Take away from the day so you can go back to your agency and never have to worry about producing content ever again. You know you’ll have strategies on how to come up with ideas. We’ve barely scratched the surface on this episode, but if you think this episode has been even remotely beneficial, then you honestly, I don’t think you can afford to miss this. It’s us giving you the specifics so you know, we’ll be giving you out lots of handouts and yes, we’ll be talking about the benefits and things like that, but you’ll actually have a strategy to go away with. You’ll have blog posts ideas in abundance and that’s the reality and it’s purposeful blog posts as well, not just, Oh, great, I’ve got lots of work to do when I get back. We’re going to talk about whether or not you can outsource this and what you might need to do before it gets to that point. There’s going to be people in the room who write content on an ongoing basis consistently, you know, content writers who you can potentially speak to on the day. There’s just so much knowledge and experience that we’ve got over the years, each and our agencies and we can’t wait to give you all a strategy so that you know exactly what to do. I’ll be honest with you, you’re not going to stop working if you think after that you’re going to get the train home and you’re going to have a chill. You won’t want to do that. You will have so many ideas and you’ll want to plan out your entire 2020 of content and will at the very least, you’ll have the next 90 days worth of content carved out without question. So yeah, that’s what we’re going to be doing. It’s going to be very, very actionable and it might not take you as long as you think to have a content driven agency. There’s a few hacks and a few secrets that we’ve learned over the time to save yourself a lot of time. So it’s really exciting and we can’t wait to see you in Manchester.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Absolutely. Now the reason we’ve joined forces as well is yes, I know how to create content. I’m a specialist in building up a big audience on this podcast, et cetera. But equally, the guys Lyndsay and Martin are both great at the written word and they’ve built their audience that way. So we want to be able to give you that kind of broad spectrum of content types. But also each one of us have very unique skills. Lyndsay is so Uber organised and helps create phenomenal frameworks supported by Martin. Martin is a great, you mate are a great teacher as well. So I’ve seen some of your content that you create inside of your own premium memberships. You are a, a great teacher and a great orator, et cetera. Then obviously I am there just to be the good looking one. No, I’m joking. I’m the obviously talking for me because I’m actually the lazy entrepreneur. So I produce a lot, but that’s only because I’m lazy. I will be there as well. Teaching relevant hacks, structures, et cetera. Now cost-wise, this is going to cost approximately 200 to 300 pounds. However, we will be doing a black Friday deal because why not? And because everybody listening to this episode are part of our wonderful community and have supported as along the way Martin or what are we going to judge on black Friday?

Martin Huntbach: This is actually the first time we’ve revealed this and I weren’t even sure if you were gonna ask me. So the main thing that you need to do right now is if you want a discount and you want to get in because tickets and seats are limited because of the venues that we’re looking at. You need to go to agencycontentframework.com and register your interest. So if you’re listening to this before black Friday, that is the number one priority. Get your name in on that and enter your name and email address and we’ll let you know as soon as the tickets are available. So yeah, the full price is going to be 300 pound. I think we’ve already agreed on this, but if you sign up on Friday and you know we’ve not decided on when we’re going to, we’re going to change this, but you can get in at 50% off 147 pounds plus VAT and you will be able to grab yourself a ticket. But we’ve already got a lot of people who’ve registered their interest. We’re already probably have more people on the email list than we can serve. So it’s really, really important that you’re aware of that and that you don’t wait until Friday to jump on the email list. Otherwise, you know, we may run out of tickets and I just don’t want you to be disappointed.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, we’ll email that list as soon as those go live as well. So if you do want to be aware of when they go live. Like Martin said, the venue locations we’re looking at, we want to create a kind of a nice, cosy is the wrong word, but which one will create a good working environment so there’s not too many of us and we can then assist you all in creating at least your next 90 days worth of content planning and strategy. So be sure to get on that list so that you can come and join us in sunny Manchester. That’s February the 6th 2020 agency content framework.com for more details or check out the show notes of this episode. Martin, I can’t wait.

Martin Huntbach: It’s going to be so much fun.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So much fun.

Martin Huntbach: And there will be social stuff afterwards so we can all have a drink and a chill and it will be amazing.

Lee Matthew Jackson: And as they call it in Manchester at a bevvy.

Martin Huntbach: Absolutely.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Although that was more of a Scouse accent, but anyway the Americans would never know. Right. I’m going to kick you off the show now, I think we’re done, aren’t we?

Martin Huntbach: Absolutely. I’ve got stuff to do.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Let’s do a recap guys. A very quick recap. From this episode you have learnt what are some of the blockers to your creativity. You’ve also learnt how to find some inspiration to overcome those blockers. You’ve also learnt some content creation hacks, and you’ve also heard from the horse’s mouth some of the benefits that have come from content marketing. So if you want more, come and join us. That’s agencycontentframework.com from Lee and Martin it’s over and out.