Why Your Content Isn’t Working (And How to Fix It Fast) | Podcasting Tips

If your content isn’t getting traction, it’s not because you’re not working hard it’s because you’re not creating what your audience actually wants.

In this episode, Josh and Aaron break down how to build content that people are already searching for, and how businesses from bricklayers to engineers are using simple, authentic video and podcasting strategies to generate real results.

You’ll learn how to:

• Turn everyday conversations into high-performing content
• Use Google’s “People Also Ask” to generate endless content ideas
• Overcome camera anxiety and show up authentically
• Create high-velocity content without overthinking production
• Leverage podcasting for client attraction and brand building

If you’re a small business owner or marketing manager looking to grow through podcasting for marketing, this episode gives you a practical, no-fluff blueprint to follow.

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Transcript

0:00

It's all about building content that you know, people are going to want to see. And how do you know they're going to want to see it? That is what we're going to talk about this week. Stay tuned. Aaron, your your agency is content only and you have this as first off, you're on the other side of the planet, which makes this kind of interesting. Um, you have your pitch of thirty days in thirty minutes. We talk about building your month's worth of content in sixty minutes. So I see some pretty good parallels in how we do things. I'm excited to talk about this. You talked about starting your podcast to get better at your craft. Um, sounds like a good base where like there's got, I feel like there's a bigger story to that though than Then just I want to get better. Like, where's where's the big roots in your origin story for doing your show? Josh oddly enough, back in twenty fourteen, I had a little something called the Jack and as show and it was a SoundCloud based podcast. I can't remember how many episodes we did. It was on free conference call me and my business partner at the time would just dial in and have a conversation. So that's actually the first iteration of podcasting. It dates back a fair while. So you go way back. Did that. Now did you start like the like? So is this the same podcast in continuation then? Definitely not. That podcast lapsed after that. What are the stats on podcasts? It definitely sat within those stats. I love it, I think it's the last one that I saw was it was eighty six percent. Don't make it past episode fifteen. So but yeah, so when going back to that, so you guys specialize in building like what you call high velocity content. And I love the name in that. Um, like when you're building that for clients, where did you figure out like, hey, this is a, there's a gap in the market here that you can fill. We fill the same gap. We're working in the same lanes here. What was the moment for you? Were you like, oh, people just need to talk into a microphone and we'll make a ton of content for them. It came out of frustration. Initially. We were an agency that would write content for our clients, and then we were always chasing them up for the media side to get the photos. And we'd spend half our week just trying to get what we needed. And by accident, I was having a conversation like this with a Melbourne bricklayer of all people on Zoom, and it just so happened that I hit record and then I flicked it over to my editor and go, can you cut any clips from this chat I had with Mark? Is the name of the gentleman that you think we could use as social media content? And I got twelve clips back and I was like, hang on a minute. That was without planning. It was impromptu. There were no scripts. And I've got twelve clips from a bricklayer. I think we're on to something here. Holy cow. I mean, it's I feel like just the way you say that. Twelve clips from a bricklayer. Most of us don't think of bricklayers as marketing geniuses. Um. I'm trying to. That's fair. I think stumbled across too many that are geniuses at marketing. I just I feel like there's a they are very good at laying bricks of which I am not very good at. I mean, my wall would probably have a curve to it, a bend to it and stand for. Once I get above about four feet, I guarantee it would fall over. Uh, so it stemmed from that. How has. And I mean, how long ago was that? I'd say three to four years ago. I can never remember the exact date. But let's go with three and a half years. And in between the two. Yeah. Round round numbers. Yeah. How has it changed? Like things for. And let's start with how did it change things for the bricklayer. What like what what changed with their marketing or your. I mean, your marketing even. What changed for them with that? Imagine in the construction industry, certainly in Australia, not a lot of bricklayers putting videos out. Not a lot of content going out from people in the construction or trade space, as we call it. So instantly, Mark, this bricklayer is out there on video because he is probably the only one that we knew about doing it. He stuck out like a sore thumb and instantly all the builders in the construction industry see Mark and they go, ah, Are Mark from cricket. You're that guy who does all the videos. He started to get tenders on projects that he couldn't get a look at before he started to be able to recruit people to come work at his company, because he was the only bricklayer that was out there on social media talking on video. Interesting. So I mean, it really it's it was the turning point in his business very much because he's now quoting stuff. And how did it build? Do you think it built that like the know, like and trust that he was looking for with those the, the bigger companies where I mean, they realized he was just a bricklayer initially, but now he's a company picture, an Australian bricklayer. It's one of the more cliche Australian visuals that you get. It's if you're picturing an Australian bricklayer, it ticks every single box that you can imagine. And it's very cool to have showing up on videos, very laid back, very funny. And imagine someone at a pub having a beer that's a bricklayer right there. So him showing up conversationally on video, very authentically, that's going to instantly cut through and have an impact. And now he's on council boards, he's speaking at industry events, all because of this video presence that started back three and a half years ago. Oh that's amazing. I love hearing that. That being said, he's a bricklayer. Um, we're, we're going to hammer on this story and I hope he doesn't beat me up for it. Oh. To me, like you said, it was a Zoom call. I'm assuming that this wasn't like a studio. Like what I'm sitting here right now. Is that like with some of those clips in that, have you found that done is better than perfect? Or like, do you feel the authenticity is what comes through? What are, what are your thoughts with when you're, when you're working on that? Interestingly. Less production. Maybe it is the authenticity that comes across through that has really landed with a lot of clients. And I understand there are certain lanes and spaces where you want to have a level of production, particularly if that's what you do, because you want to showcase that to an extent. But I've found even with myself, the more authentic, the less polished, even with bad lighting me, just walking around holding a phone with no microphone, those videos often get received much better than anything that's highly edited, highly B-roll produced lots of captions, and I do think it does make you approachable. It does make you real. It does make you human. And that in a world where we're moving more into AI and synthetic content, people trust that. And that's why I think it works really well with the human aspect of it. There is something in many humans where they see a camera and they freak the hell out. I've joked for me, um, I have completely washed myself of any dignity whatsoever. Um, that's what makes it so I can get in front of the camera. How do you like. I'm sure you've had some clients that when it comes to getting in front of the camera, let's say it's not where they would like to spend their time. How have you helped people with that? The reality is very few people ever want to get on camera. What do you say? Then what? Where do you put the content? Oh, there's all these questions. What equipment do you use? The setup? So many variables that get in their mind. But this approach having conversations, most people can do that. That was the differentiator for me. Imagine having a FaceTime with your best friend. You're on camera essentially, but you don't go, oh, I'm recording on video right now. I'm just chatting away with someone that I love talking to. So when we're able to set it up in a way that was conversational and two minutes in, you forget that you're recording and that's what you're doing. Then that got people past that fear. It got them into themselves, showing up authentically, talking as they would talk if they were having a conversation with a friend. And that got the content to a point where it was really on brand, and it was really a representation of who they were, as opposed to staring down a camera trying to read a script, take after take, ending in tears, swearing and smashing the lighting and camera onto the ground. So yeah. I have seen a number of people that have that look on their face of, I would like to chuck that camera out the out the window. Um, I have, I have also seen a number of people, I've, I, my comment to that is I am about to put a Josh shaped hole in that wall. Um, so yeah, I get that when you guys are going through and working with clients on this. Um, is there a like, is this specifically just to get the clips or how do you, how do you, I guess I would say, what's your approach to make sure that you are getting clips? Because as I'm sure you've experienced too, there's times where someone does a conversation and they come out of it and you're like, well, that was awful. Um, and you're like, no one said anything anyone wants to listen to in that. Um, like, what do you guys do to make sure that there's something that you can pull from a clip from that? Is there a, is there a magic wand? There is a magic wand. There is. Josh yes. And I, I'm going to share it with your listeners. So they have a magic wand. The every conversation, the business owner is in a niche or an industry getting relevant content ideas to talk about that. The audience feels like you're in their head is really important. So there's a section on Google that not everyone's familiar with. That's the people Also Ask section and we'll start there to get some really good stepping off points. So people are answering questions that are front and center for their target audience. And then we went ahead and built a GPT that just grabs the top thirty questions for any search from Google. So in 10s, we've got thirty stepping off points for a topic. Then we might go to another topic and we'll just grab a series of those top questions from five or six different topics. And that gives us relevant ideas to talk about that we know their target audience is asking online and would generally help solve their problems and create some goodwill. So once again, between Google and ChatGPT, you've got the two oracles there. Yes. Uh, I mean, they do. They tell you what the people want. Uh, we talked a little bit about the business impact, about how he's speaking and, and everything like that. Do you have another good example? I mean, what I love about the bricklayer story too is that that that was kind of happenstance. Um, it was just, uh, I recorded this, send it to the editor and let's see what the hell happens. Um, have there been others that are, I would say, like they've come at it with more intent from the beginning. And what's been the different result with that? You've seen with that more than Nisha, the business owner. Is the market easy? They cut through. We've found we've had an example of a rail consultancy of everything in rail. There's not too many rail engineers putting content, and you wouldn't think there'd be too many people tuning in to listen to. But we had Steve. Steve Muscat is the gentleman's name, and he's funny for an engineer. He's not what you'd picture. He's not someone that sits there and is very direct. He has a real personality. It's similar to Mark. We had a look around. There was not one company we could see putting anything out on social media. So we put Steve Hughes. He wears very bright colored shirts. He's got a mustache and he jokes around. He's very playful. He's a little bit flirtatious even on camera, which is good fun. When we put him out again in the engineering space, he stood out immediately and had the same impact that Mark had, where he went from obscurity to sitting on government tenders and tripling the size of his team just to meet capacity by putting content out in his platform. Where the content went was LinkedIn. So he wasn't even going and diversifying in too many places. That's a really good example, again, of someone in an aerospace. But we've also had people that are in quite taboo industries as well. We had one that was in the tech space and, uh, yeah, she blew up very quickly because she was having very talking about topics in conversations that most people avoid and. Right. Yeah, that that blew up pretty fast as well. So are you guys like this is this is interesting to me. So are you guys taking some people and finding the holes in social media where like there and it's, I find it a weird concept to me that after social media has been around for twenty years, um, that there's still topics with holes in them. Um, are those people that you're approaching for that is like looking for that or are they approaching you saying, hey, how do I do this? Yeah, basically approaching us, which is fortunate. We yeah, yeah. We don't we run a lot of advertising and things of that nature. So we run mini events and we'll just put an Eventbrite event on, run meta ads and say, this is what we do, come and see how we do it, basically. And all these different business owners show up in the room. We get everything from Dentists through to solo practitioner coaches show up. So maybe we should be a bit more specific in our message. So that but it's good fun. And at the end, uh, we'll just hand out a form and say, hey, if you think this would work and it's something you want help with and fill in the form and we'll have a chat about it. And that's a model that we've used to grow the business, which is why we get a broad spectrum of different industries and not intentionally niches in some cases. But when we do see someone that is in a narrow field, our eyes light up because we know it's so easy to stand out and cut through the noise because there's just less competition for them. Yeah, that makes sense. And what's so ironic about this is as I think about this, my last guest, Auggie, um, the irony in what you said is amazing because he was a dentist that turned into a coach. Wow. There you go. What a segue. So the fact that you said both dentists and coaches in the same room. I'm like, oh my God, yeah, here we've got people that, uh, that do that with that. I mean, I know so many people have different sales cycles. Uh, I mean, there's if your big ticket items, that's not an impulse buy. Um, I started a part of my career was at a semi truck dealership and the owner was like, all the trucks need to be out front looking good in case someone's driving down the road. I'm like, no one's making a two hundred thousand dollars impulse purchase. You know what I mean? For their business? It's just not. Oh, that one's shiny. We're gonna. What is like for some of the more standard industries for the dentist, for the, um, let's say for the, the life coach for those types of people. What do you see as that time for that, for them to start to gain traction on social media as, as the clips are going in. We've got a twist on that, especially for a localized business. A dentist is a great example of that. Most people will create content, put it online, and then it's up to the algorithm to do do its thing. Sure. What we would say is if you're a local provider is boost it locally. So sponsor the content, promote it, and you will stand out very quickly. Imagine I lived in a place called Box Hill. If you had Box Hill mums and then you went into the content for dentists, he had to take care of your family's teeth or whatever it is. Then you're circulating that to Box Hill Suburb. Instantly you cut through and stand out. So it's about localizing the distribution, and that's how you get the edge because you, on a global scale, one, you can't service someone on the other side of the world. So there's not much point in reaching them. So how do you make it so you can be number one and you can cut through. You just narrow it down to the areas that you serve. And even if you can serve nationally or internationally, start locally and infiltrate the local area and get known in your postcode or zip code, as you call it in the States and all of a sudden business and there's a trust transference and being close. That's why we do the events, because it's in person and they go, oh, I know where your office is. If you mess up, I can come and knock on the door. And that really helps with conversions. So. It's funny, to me, it's one of the things that like where video is amazing because it does like people know what you look like, they know how you move, they know how you sound. But once again, there's something to be said for a handshake and being able to like, hey, if we screwed this up, you can punch me in the mouth. Um, there's, there's something, there's something about that, um, you talk about like how podcasting can be leverage. Yeah. Um, if the foundation's weak on it, though, we realize like leverage against a weak foundation makes the foundation collapse pretty quickly. What is a mistake that you found that maybe you guys have made or that people that you've worked with have made where you're like, oh no, this we need, we need to undo this before we can move forward. Because for us, I always say, smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. How have you guys been kicked in the teeth? Or someone you work with been kicked in the teeth? I'll call myself out on this one because. I think that's fair. When we started the current podcast, I called it, I believe it was marketing business wealth, and that had really nothing to do with the business and the agency that I was in. It was so broad and I'm trying to talk about or get guests on about all these different topics. It really wasn't going to move the needle for me in any way whatsoever. And that was a learning curve because I was building this broad base where no one's really going to tune in, because I'm talking about all these different topics and narrowing it down and staying in your area of specialization, the lane that you qualified to talk about that was really important. I see the same mistakes made a bit when I talked to people. I want to go really broad and appeal to everyone, and ultimately they appeal to no one in the end. And it took a while for me to go, oh, you need to stay where you're good. And then you can add the value and where people will tune in. And it might actually lead to growing the business as opposed to all over the shop. That was one of the biggest mistakes I made early on. It's funny, um, I have made that same exact mistake. Um, and it's something we coach people on all the time. We're like, hey, you really need to niche in and like, what about you? Yeah. So the knowing nod yeah, you're like, oh, damn it, they called me on my own stuff. Yeah, it what? I mean, AI is a big thing. We talked, I mean, briefly about how like, we're creating this authentic connection. Um, algorithms change. Like I still, we still love LinkedIn. We're, we're business to business primarily. What do you see as the future for like this person to person? And I guess I would say because you guys do so much with the social media side, what do you say is the social media side? And then to what do you see as the podcasting side of things? Very interesting pocket of time we're in at the moment. Yeah, the AI avatars are more realistic than they were initially. We've got many channels that are essentially faceless and you've got this creation working a script. I find it very hard at the moment personally to follow that content. You can tell in the blinking patterns, you can tell in the delivery. It's very polished that this is not a human being. And I struggle with the trust side and the lack of authenticity, which is interesting. And I understand that there are going to be people that love AI content and the algorithm's going to serve AI content because they know that's what's going to keep them on the platform. And there's certainly AI content that I enjoy. So history stuff it's put together, which I love. On the expert side, for me, I still think there'll always be a place for human content just because we want to have that connection where human listening to another human, where I heard, uh, species and without connection, uh, we do find ourselves lost and we do a lot of people do slide when they don't have that element in their lives. And we'll always seek that out. So my take is that the more human you make yourself moving forward, you're going to stand out so much more because there's going to be more and more synthetic content. So those that can display that they are in fact a human being and they're not an AI avatar, are the ones that I think on the business front in In particular will get the business because people go, well, I want to buy from a human being because I can trust them. I can hear their voice. If they are local, I can shake their hand. Whereas they all know that a synthetic avatar is just a creation that's getting fed. What it's saying. Particularly for those high end service providers where they are making a decision that has some weight behind it financially. I believe that they want to buy from humans and it'll always have a place. And the more you can showcase that, the better to me. Yeah, I totally agree with that because it comes down to that. Hey, I can walk down there and punch him in the mouth if I if I don't like something. I don't like how something's going. It's the, it's it's interesting too, because of the, the, as we see the AI stuff getting better, I it's funny, I had someone tell me the other day, they're like, yeah, AI is still putting like ten fingers on one hand. And I'm like, You need to go look at stuff like from the past couple of weeks because it's no longer doing that. Correct? Um, yeah, I, I have found that to be really, really interesting with that. For the clips, we're using AI to help us cut clips up. Are you guys doing something similar with that? There's two pathways because we have a teacher DIY where we essentially give give strategy away. So there's Opus Clip, there's gap Munch, wherever you feed it an episode, it's going to cut clips, but it's a bit sporadic. As you've probably seen. It's a bit random. So we still manually cut. We have Francois on our team. We know what we're targeting because we've got those listed questions. So we're going for very specific content. His job is to farm through, get to that point and grab a really engaging hook LED piece of content twenty 30s that corresponds to what we're targeting. So he will cut that, but then we put it into either Canva or tools that will generate the captions on top. Add in some B-roll if that's part of the brand or not. If it's not part of the brand. Put the overlays in and that's all AI technology. Doing those bits of the puzzle. We will take the transcription of the episode and just put it into a GPT that will repurpose the spoken words into the post, which takes 10s. We use AI to accelerate quality control, but there's very much a hybrid strategy where we have that human intervention to make sure we're achieving the goals that we set out to achieve for that business and that client. It's funny, we found almost the identical thing because and once again, the thing that I kind of take solace in is so yeah, we use descript a lot, or we use Opus Clip primarily for some of the, for some of the broader clips. But if it's something very specific, we know we want, once again, we're going in. We're narrowing down what I found. We found the same thing you guys have where AI has made it so we can be much more effective. Um, we've streamlined stuff. We can get three times the amount of work done because we've got AI helping us. Um, it sounds like you guys have done the same thing in terms of building tools also. I joked that, I mean, every tool in my toolbox can be a hammer. Um, and lord only knows I've used wrenches as hammers. I've used pliers as hammers, I've used ratchets. I mean, every tool can be a hammer. Um, but not every hammer can. Not a hammer. A hammer can't be every tool. And we have found so many people use AI like a hammer and they're like, yeah, this they're trying loosening a bolt with a hammer and you're like, no, no, no, no, that, that, that that's not how that works. And it's nice to hear that we're doing something similar in that to, to realize that there's a, there's a parallel with it with that. I mean, is there something that you feel like we've missed or anything like that in the conversation? Because if not, I've got my main big question. I don't think we've missed anything. I think we've ticked all the main boxes and yeah, didn't make it this far, then it shouldn't be in there. It's my position on that. I love it, I love it. Uh, now there's a caveat to that is if you could give one piece of advice to a business owner, um, that maybe is just starting out with podcasting or just starting out with the social media side or, um, considering it, what would that piece of advice be? And you cannot say just press record because that is the lamest answer ever. Um, and everyone's like, just press record. I'm like, no, you cannot just press. Everyone knows. You just have to press record. What are you going to tell someone that's just starting in on this journey? Took the words out of my mouth just now. What I would say. Is if you don't get out there and put yourself on camera, you're just going to be a logo and a business name. And when you are in that position, you're just going to get price shot because there's no differentiator. Yes, you'll get some referrals and word of mouth, but if people are looking at your business and they can't understand how you're different, whether it's through quality, whether it's through speed of turnaround, whether it's a more hands on process, then get prepared to get price shopped. And then it's a race to the bottom, which means your business will find it really hard to make profit. How is it if you stand out and you separate yourself from the noise and it's evident how you're different from everyone else, all of a sudden they're buying from a human being and they're buying because they trust you, and they're buying because they know you're an expert, which means the price equation gets pushed out to the side in a lot of cases, because they're buying for the certainty that you can do what I need you to do for me. And that's the reason they need to get out there on video. I love that the, the, the big differentiator. Um, what a what well put Aaron, I appreciate the time today, especially because like we're recording this. It's two o'clock in the afternoon here. It's five o'clock in the morning for you. Um, we joked that we're both psychotic in the hours that we keep, um, let's just keep that as a joke because it might be true. I love it. Where can people find you? Where can people find your agency? If you go to, there's a training there. There's all my social handles. It's the easiest single place to go. Find everything that you need to find, including the podcast as well. Love it. Aaron, thank you for the time today for everyone else out there. I've got to finish some stuff up to look at. He gave me some good tidbits to summarize here. I'll be right back. Thanks, Josh. It's always interesting to me to talk to people that are parallel to what we do. It's I mean, there's not competition here. There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's four million active podcasts, so we're not in competition. But I love the ability when we're able to exchange notes with someone. Obviously, he was on the other side of the planet. Very, very cool. Always to be able to have the chance to talk with someone that's different, culturally different, like all those different things, but is doing something similar to me. It makes it so there's so many good lessons in what we can learn in that. With that. The one, the one thing that always comes up is that authenticity. Talk about something you enjoy, talk about something you like, and talk about something you can speak honestly about. Additionally, be honest, be yourself. Anyone that knows me, that my personality on the microphone is my personality in person. It's who I am. No one else wants to be like this. Be your self. Make sure that you're doing things as yourself, because that is who people want to want to engage with. A lot of people try and change themselves because they, they feel like, oh, well, people would like this better. No, people like you. Now, granted, not everyone is going to like you, but more people are going to like you than are going to like the fake you. You have to trust me on this one. The people also ask was a great thing from Google. We've. We nose into that from time and time again when we're looking for topics, when we're looking to talk to people, when we're looking to figure out what questions to ask, we're going to look at what people also ask. It is a great way to get that insight into what people really want to know about your topic. Go out, type in something about maybe if you've got another guest, type in that guest's name, see what's under the. People also ask who is so and so. Um, find things out about them. Those are the things that you want to cover. The other thing that I liked too was when he said they looked for social media holes. Social media has been around long enough and everyone says it's saturated. Everyone says like podcasting is saturated. It's not. There's holes out there. Now, once again, there's probably a bricklaying podcast out there. There's probably bricklaying, social media clips out there, but there's probably not bricklaying, social media clips in that guy's area. That is the key, is making sure that it's specific enough that you've got something to go on that isn't already crowded. If you just say, hey, I want to talk about bricklaying, there's a lot of material out there. If you say, hey, I want to talk about bricklaying in Akron, Ohio, guess what? There's probably not going to be as many people talking about that. And you will find listeners with that because you're not competing for listeners. You, you've got a you've got a small audience here. You're going to get all of those people with that. The, the big the big piece of advice that you talk about the. If you don't if your business doesn't have a personality, if it doesn't have a face attached to it, if it doesn't have a voice attached to it, you're just a logo in a business name and you're going to get price shopped. I absolutely loved that you have something to offer. You have a personality. You. Your business has a personality. Lean into those things. Make sure people are aware of those things. Why? Because those have a value. Once again, it's it's not a direct like out the door value. It's a value that people are going to feel. It's a value that people are willing to pay for. If you don't want to get price shopped all the time, make sure that you, your personality, your business's personality, make sure that all of those things are out there presenting value to people. Show how you're different. Huge with that. To me, this was a different conversation. It moved fast. I truly had a lot of fun with it. And yeah, that being said, unless you want me to have to go through the people also ask, do me a favor, put in the comments what you would like to know about podcasting, what your podcasting questions are, what's preventing you from getting started, how your business will be affected from podcasting? Any one of those things. I would absolutely love to hear from you. As always, take care of yourself. If you can take care of someone else too, I will see you very, very soon.