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Give Your Content the Best Chance To Be Seen by the Right People, Consistently!

James Tennant is the Founder of Converge, a content amplification firm for B2B businesses. He has over 12 years of experience helping B2B companies and organizations of all sizes in various industries create and share great content to educate, inspire, and bring value to their audiences. James offers a range of editing and copywriting services to improve the overall quality of any written materials companies might circulate. He is also the co-host of The Barndoors and Banjos Football Podcast.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[01:36] James Tennant shares his background and the genesis of Converge
[02:48] Things to consider when creating and promoting content
[05:31] The value of promoting content
[11:30] Converge’s content promotion process
[15:39] Why building networks with influential people within your industry is important in content creation
[18:40] James talks about the best type of content for engaging with a bigger audience
[27:59] James’ advice for companies starting content creation
[32:40] How content marketing impacts M&A

In this episode…

Do you want to reach a bigger audience using content you’ve already created? How can you consistently get your content in front of the right people?

According to James Tennant, creating great content is not enough to build trust, authority, and brand awareness. Promoting it makes the difference because the right people will consume it, and a well-promoted average piece of content outperforms poorly promoted first-class content. James shares how he helps B2B businesses with content amplification to reach a bigger, broader audience consistently.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Pat Yates sits down with James Tennant, Founder of Converge, to discuss promoting and amplifying content to reach a larger audience. James talks about what to consider when creating and promoting content, Converge’s content promotion process, and the best type of content to help you engage with more audiences.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi, folks. It’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Pat Yates 0:18

Hello, everyone, welcome back to the Quiet Light Podcast. I’m Pat Yates sitting in for Joe Valley. We had a great conversation coming to you today from James Tennant with converge.today. I’ll be honest, I don’t know a whole lot about content and implementation how to get that out there. So it’s a fascinating discussion to understand for you people that are out there creating content in ways that you can get your content out to more people, I think that the biggest thing that people don’t realize sometimes is they think their engagement is much better than what it is. And this gives you an opportunity to sort of maybe even AB test some of your content to understand the engagement it’s getting or what it could get. It’s exciting to hear all this today. And I think this conversation you’re really, really going to love so let’s get to James right away. Hello, everyone. I’m with James Tennant today on the Quiet Light Podcast. How are you doing today, James?

James Tennant 1:21

I’m doing very well Pat. How are you?

Pat Yates 1:23

I am great. It’s great to have you in this morning. I know we have a little bit of a time difference here. So I’m on morning. You’re probably on the afternoon, though.

James Tennant 1:29

Yeah, not too late into the afternoon. Just after two.

Pat Yates 1:32

That’s great. So why don’t you tell us all about you and where you’re from?

James Tennant 1:36

Sure. So my name is James Tennant, I’m from the northeast of England, near Durham, if anyone is aware of any parts of the Northeast of England, not too far from the Scottish border. My background is in concept marketing and copywriting. I’ve been doing that for about 13 years now, mainly as a freelancer. In the last few years, we set up a company called Converge, which is designed to help businesses promote their content. Because of the 13 years that I had doing content strategies and content marketing for businesses, one of the biggest problems companies seem to have was not necessarily in the creation of content, more so actually getting people to read and engage with the content. So that’s why Converge exists. And that’s a little bit about my background.

Pat Yates 2:19

That’s great. So I think you hit on a really good point, one that I want to make really important, anyone can come up with marketing strategies, create assets, things like that. But if the rubber doesn’t meet the road, and consumers or whoever their target audience is, don’t receive that information. It’s sort of throwing good money at bad and good time at bad. So tell me a little bit about maybe what are some of the few things that people should focus on when they’re thinking about this. They come in and work with Converge? What are the things they look at the metrics you look at, to make sure that content is being seen by their end users?

James Tennant 2:48

Yeah, sure. The first thing they need to do is fully understand what it is their audiences after. So before any type of marketing or promotion of the content, they actually need to be sure that why does that create in the first place that they’re probably spending a lot of time and maybe quite a bit of money on as well is actually worth promoting when they get to that stage. So understanding as much as you possibly can about your audience, the sort of content thereafter, the channels that they tend to spend time on the format in which they prefer to consume their content, all of that is really worth digging as deep as you possibly can into figure out, then once you feel like you’ve produced something that you would, okay, this is answering questions, it’s sharing a unique point of view, it’s a really high-quality piece of thought leadership, or it takes a spiky point of view as well, something that’s maybe a little bit different that you’d like to get out into the world. Once you’ve got that. That’s when you need to figure out how it is you’re going to make sure that content gets in front of the right people. And that’s where all that research will come in handy. You figured out already where it is that your audience hangs out online, there, what digital publications they read, which tangible real-life public publications they read, which social media platforms are they hanging out on. And then you’ll use that information to market that content, to the marketing part of content marketing, to actually get the content in front of those people to give it the best chance of being seen first of all, and then if it’s really good, hopefully, it’ll get engaged with and then beyond that, you’ll start to build up trust authority and your brand among a new audience of the right people. Because it’s no longer a case and it hasn’t been for some time. We’re just creating the content and creating amazing content is enough. There’s way too much noise out there now, we have to spend more time promoting content that we currently are.

Pat Yates 4:41

That makes total sense. So James, let me ask you this. I like to come into these podcasts even though I have a little bit of understanding of your market and what Converge does I like to come in like I know nothing which is really easy for me to fake trust me. But when I look at this, it’s talking about the ability to read and I read this on a page and I just kept reading it because it’s sort of like I had to read it several to understood what it meant. It says reach significantly more of your target audience, which is something I never really thought about when you hit your target audience, some people just look at conversion rate and engagement and say, hey, I’m just glad I’m talking to people. But they don’t deep dive into that. And what you’re talking about here is the little things that are creeping out that you’re not making money on when you’re doing good content, because you’re not implementing correct. Am I on the right page there? And maybe what starts that process? It is the quality of the content or the quality of the channel they’re putting it in? Or is it a multiple thing?

James Tennant 5:31

I think it’s a multiple thing. Having said that, you know, an average piece of content that’s well-promoted is probably going to outperform an amazing piece of content, that’s, that’s poorly promoted. So it certainly helps that the asset that you’ve created is high quality in the first place. Because then when you are serving it to more of the right people, it has a higher chance of doing what it is you want it to do, whether that’s, improve the trustworthiness between your potential consumers and your brand. build awareness of your brand. Or maybe it’s sort of lower down the funnel type content that you actually want to maybe get someone to do something. So whether that’s subscribe to a newsletter, or download a podcast or a long-term become a customer, it helps that the asset that you’ve created, it is high quality. But without the promotion side of it, without finding out where it is your audience hangs out, and how you can actually get that content in front of them continuously consistently. It doesn’t really matter what you’ve created. So it is a bit of both. But having a very high-quality piece of content in the first place will help in the same way that promoting your content effectively will also help as well.

Pat Yates 6:55

So tell us a little bit about I mean, if people come in, and I’m sure there’s multiple layers and steps and things that have to be done, I’m sure when they couldn’t come in their content changes slightly. But tell me a little bit about how you’ve seen maybe some practical examples, is there a company that you look at, you don’t have to give the name that came in and all of a sudden realize they did a 180 switch and how they were doing things? And it just started working for them? Is there a mentality that companies have that you try to change a little bit to make that successful? So tell me about an example maybe of that?

James Tennant 7:24

Yeah, well, to be honest, that it’s quite similar, the reaction that you get, and then the change that needs to take place in a lot of different companies, it seems that the first thing that you need to do is communicate and educate possibly stakeholders. So if you’re the employee, if you’re the content marketer at your company, and you’re trying to persuade the powers above that, you need to spend more time on this amplification or promotion side of things, rather than just constantly creating assets, content assets, then the best thing you can do is to educate the people who sit above you that the more time you spend on amplification, the better the results are going to be from all the content that you’ve already produced. It’s less, I guess that that piece of staying in constant communication with the people who sit above you make sure that they’re aware, right, because they might not be a marketer, they might not understand content, that might be someone who’s really good at running a business, but has hired you for a reason, because you’re the content marketer. And they don’t really know what that means. But the more you can educate and stay in communication with them, and get them to understand why it is you actually need to spend more time producing content, promoting content rather than producing content, the easier that sell is going to be in the long run when you actually want to make that switch. So that’s the first thing is getting the stakeholders onside. And that comes through education and communication. The second thing is that we typically seem to see from businesses is that they are swamped with all the other tasks that they have to complete as part of their role as the market or a content marketer, whether that’s, I have to create a certain number of content assets every week or every month, and I’m really up against it. To even just do that. And I’m not just doing that maybe I’m managing the social media presence as well. So I’ve got to make sure that we’re repurposing some of that content to create tweet or LinkedIn updates. Maybe on top of that they’re putting on events. So they’re hosting a podcast or the typical marketer or content marketers job in the vast majority of companies that we seem to deal with is to be honest, it’s like a two-person job. And it’s often only one person that’s doing it. So one of the big complaints we hear is that they just don’t have enough time left at the end of the month or the end of the day, to actually be able to spend any time on content promotion. So one of the best things that businesses can do is factor in the promotion amplification of content into the overall strategy to begin with. So not to think of it as a, at the end of the week, oh, we’ve got to promote that piece of content or at the end of the month, that report we got out last week, we forgot to actually tell anyone about it, you know, we haven’t promoted it enough. Let’s do that today, let’s spend 30 minutes doing that today. If it’s ad hoc like that, if it’s sort of just as in when you remember doing it, it’s not going to be done consistently, continuously enough to actually have an impact. So the best thing to do is to bake it into the strategy when you’re coming up with your overall content marketing strategy. And that way, you’re far more likely to do it. And that coupled with educating those above you will probably lead to being able to do it more often. Because you’ll have more time and getting more support from above as well, because they will understand why it is you’re doing that in the first place.

Pat Yates 10:52

That makes total sense. So people that are content creators, let’s say they do that, or maybe they have a network of four or five blogs or sites or content sites they put information on. Do you feel like when you just commented earlier on one thing that’s really, really important to people that are creating content, it takes time, it’s time-consuming. So the promotion stuff is something they don’t that sort of like just out there, maybe they think, well, if I’m putting this on my content site, it’s going to get engagement, but there’s no guarantee that happens. So tell me a little bit about the process once someone brings it to you, where all it ends up getting posted and how that helps the engagement for those people. So I’m sure they’d be curious where all this would go and how it would help.

James Tennant 11:30

Yes, so with converge, the platform exists, because we get so much feedback on, you know, with the report, every end and through myself anecdotal feedback that I got from 13 years of dealing with clients. Converge exists to help businesses that are maybe a little bit time-poor, or maybe don’t have the know-how, when it comes to content promotion actually ensure that that’s being done continuously and consistently. So what they can do is they can publish their content on our platform. And then through the various different ways we promote that content, some of its automated with syndication and promotion partners, the likes of Google News, Bing, news, Yahoo, News Now UK, News Now USA. So content syndication platforms that typically only partner with publishing platforms like Converge, they take the content that’s published on our platform, and they share it with their audience immediately. So there’s a sort of automatic thing that happens there because of relationships that we’ve established with our publication platform. The second thing is, we will take it and we’ll use our own social media channels and the network of social media channels that we have to get the content out to people who are using, say, Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn to consume content as well. And the way we choose those platforms, and how we share that content is based almost entirely on the content itself. So when someone publishes a piece of content, let’s say it’s on, we had one that’s from a construction and engineering company on different types of aggregate that are used in the creation of construction materials. So really niche. So we use that content to find construction engineering professionals. And we know that’s the audience that this company wants to reach. So we find them on these various social media platforms. And then we start serving the content to them, whether that’s through groups that exist on these platforms, for using specific hashtags that people search for, when it comes to looking for content, we’ll do a lot of that work as well. And that happens pretty much every day of every piece of content that goes on the platform. So it’s a huge time saver there for a lot of businesses that might not have the time to begin with to actually do their promotion. The final part of what we do isn’t something that we can guarantee will happen. But we will find various sources of influence, whether that’s people or publications, media platforms, or businesses that are looking for high quality curated content to share with their own networks. And we will serve the content that’s published on Converge to relevant people in relevant industries, and encourage them to share it with their networks as well. So that’s a really important part of what people should be doing when it comes to their own content promotion. So we do that as well. As I said, we can’t guarantee it because it’s up to that person or that business at the end of the day, if they actually want to share it, but we’ll do all the legwork to get it in front of them and encourage them to share it and make it as easy as possible for them to share it. So businesses that publish on our platform are not just reaching our audience, it’s reaching sources of influence within that industry and their audiences. And then further afield. The audiences have the likes of Google News, Bing news, Yahoo News Now UK and News Now USA, so there’s a whole number of ways We get the content out there.

Pat Yates 11:34

That’s really amazing. So let’s rewind to something you said early in that part, that you have relationships with people that help get the content out there. So is it fair to say that people that are creating content trying to get it out there themselves, obviously, that’s a job in itself, just trying to get it out to people trying to make your content there is that really part of the real hook here is that people can become have a larger scope, because they can come in and work with it, that they can’t get a hold of those people. I didn’t realize that was really something that would be that difficult. So tell us a little bit about how those relationships can expand people’s businesses and content?

James Tennant 15:07

Yeah, absolutely. Building a network of influential people within your industry to work with or partner with is massively beneficial to anyone who’s creating content. In fact, there’s a particular type of content that are encouraged everybody to start creating as often as they can. And that’s collaborative content. So going out to people that are relevant in your industry, and asking them to actually contribute to pieces of content that you’re creating, whether that’s video or blog, or research papers, whatever it might be, because then what happens is often, and I’ll quote, famous content marketer, Andy Crestodina, here, an ally in creation becomes an ally in promotion. So once you’ve actually produced that piece, in collaboration with maybe some really influential people that you’re looking to either work with, or you want to access their audience, once that piece of content is created, the likelihood is, they’ll probably promote that as well. So you’ve already got immediate help when it comes to your content promotion. So you should find these people not just to get in touch with them to help you promote your content, you should find these people to actually help create the content in the first place. And this is a perfect point for me to say that, using a platform like Converge, while we do exist to help businesses, we like to think of ourselves as a supplement, supplemental tool, it’s not a replacement for content promotion that that company should be doing. We exist to make sure it happens every day, continuously and consistently. And we’re there to make sure it definitely happens if it’s a really busy period, and you just don’t see where there’s going to be any time for you to be able to do it yourself. But we always say across the site, that businesses should be promoting their content themselves as well. And not just relying on platforms or tools like Converge to do it for them. Because it’s when you do it yourself, it’s when you build those relationships yourself, that it things can become sort of your content promotion, your content creation can become way more powerful, because you’re building that network. And you’re collaborating with all these people that, as I said, before, you either want to work with, or you want to get access to their audience. So I would 100% encourage anybody who’s creating content to try and build that network out for both of those reasons.

Pat Yates 17:59

So what you’re trying, Converge is complementary to not in replacement of to make sure all these clients understand that. And obviously, I think that maybe once you start working with you guys, it expands the network of people that they can work with. The great news is, is the content is going to continue to grow. So let me pivot a little bit and kind of understand when you talk about assets, and maybe this doesn’t matter as much, maybe you can work with about anything, but are there are kinds of content that you all think will work better in most situations. Is it audio? Is it video, is it just straight articles? What are the best kinds of contents? Or is there a combination that you will like to see that tends to get the better engagement? Is there one?

James Tennant 18:40

So for us that the best type of content is advice or opinion content. So whether that comes in audio, video or written format, if you’re sharing advice, if you’re answering questions, or if you’re sharing a unique opinion on something, or it doesn’t even guess necessarily have to be unique all the time, it’s just an opinion on maybe a hot topic or something that’s relevant to your audience. Those are the types of pieces of content that do very well. For our platform, we need some element of written content to promote. So if there’s a podcast or a piece of audio that comes with it, or a video, that’s fine as part of it, but we do need some written content to go around that to help promote it, because that’s often where we’ll get quotes and we’ll be able to share things out of that. And it’s just a bit easier for us to do that. Rather than just share say an embedded audio widgets or, or just a video so we take a combination. We do take news articles as well. They often performed quite well, but there’s just a much shorter shelf life for news content. It’s typically out of date, within on average two weeks to a month it’s usually out of date, whereas a piece of advice or opinion on a topic could be could stay relevant for years. And that means as long as that person is a member of Converge, we can be promoting it for that long. So, yeah, we’ll take news advice and opinion, but the stuff that performs the best, by far is the advice or opinion.

Pat Yates 20:18

That’s really good stuff. So I noticed when I was looking through the site that you don’t have to have a brand new start, stop, like you have to create brand new content to begin with you, you can go back and look at stuff that was published before that maybe got decent engagement, or maybe one that didn’t. So tell me about that is are there times when things become relevant again, that maybe you say, I’d like to recycle the assets I have, versus creating new assets do a lot of people take that approach or just new creation.

James Tennant 20:46

So I think one of the big problems that those businesses have is they think that because content fell flat in the past, they have to create new content. And then they end up in this cycle where they’re just doing nothing but create, create, create, and then never promoting it. And as I said before, these days, without promotion, the likelihood of content being seen, unless you already got a massive audiences, you’re hugely engaged audience. So you’ve really influential individual in your industry, which for 99.9% of us, it’s just not the case, you have to promote your content. So, certainly, you need to ditch the idea that just because the last piece of content didn’t work, you have to go out and create a new piece of content, the chances are, most businesses have probably got a handful of pieces of already created that are actually really good. And so answer the questions people are searching for, they share a unique opinion on something they are just interesting reads that your audience would really engage with, the problem is at the time, you just probably didn’t promote them, nobody saw them. If it just went on your blog, and you share it once or twice on Twitter, or share the link on LinkedIn. You haven’t really given that piece of content, any chance at all actually being seen. You think about how quickly the feeds update on the social channels, and how quick how often the algorithms change on the social channels. If you’re publishing a link, just every so often about a piece of content, it’s just gonna get buried, and it’s never gonna get seen. And organic traffic is really difficult to generate organic results are really difficult to generate these days, whether that’s on social platforms, or on search engines. So to give yourself the best possible opportunity of getting your content seen, you have to promote it. And the chances are, you probably already have a handful of pieces that you could look back at and go you know what, actually, that’s a really good piece that got a little bit of engagement. And it we know answers the questions, we know, this is what our audience is looking for. Let’s take that piece. And let’s take a handful of other pieces. And spend a month or two actually promoting these rather than creating any new assets. And we’ll see what happens. run an experiment, you can use platforms like Converge to do it, but maybe run an experiment yourself as well take a couple of pieces and actually spend some time promoting them, you’ll probably be surprised at how much better the results are.

Pat Yates 23:21

That’s really an incredible approach because it kind of gives you sort of a pseudo-AB test where you’ve had it before. And you’ve done that content on your own. And now you have a company like Converge that’s gonna go out there and promote it for you. You see the tangible results, which, to me seems amazing, because it doesn’t cost you any money to create the content. It’s already there. It’s sort of a free roll to understand what you guys can do. Am I correct in that?

James Tennant 23:42

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we’ll take content that people have published before in the past. And if you put it on the platform, we will promote it. Often one of the questions we get asked about that is if the duplicate content issue that comes up, but I would encourage people to go search at what Google have actually said about the duplicate content issue, and it really isn’t an issue, it’s more of a mystery. If you’re stealing content and stealing content at scale, and sharing it, then you’re probably going to get hit with a penalty. But one of the ways we mitigate that problem. Anyway, even though as I said, it’s not really a problem is that we embed a canonical link within every article that shed on the platform to tell search engines that we did not publish the content first. And to actually index the original page that published the content first. So we do mitigate any issue that might arise from any duplicate content issue. Now, the reason I bring that up is just because that’s a question we get asked frequently as to can I share content that’s already been shared on my platform? Yes, you can. There’s no problem and we have a way of solving a problem even if there was one I guess.

Pat Yates 24:12

That’s great. Now I noticed one thing on there so some people that try to monetize this and have affiliate links and things like that, you cannot do that in this situation correct. But if someone has, let’s say, an e-comm driven content site, they’re trying to gain, you know, sales from and click-throughs to be able to buy products tell me, is there a workaround or is just simple, this needs to be straight content that doesn’t have anything to do with e-comm and purchases.

James Tennant 25:17

So the reason we say no to affiliate content is we didn’t have that in the past. And people were sharing affiliate content on the platform. And we found that it was very low quality, often and stuffed with links. So the content really just existed. All the content around the links just existed simply to flesh out all of the links that were on the page. So we just put a blanket no on purely affiliate content, if for anyone that’s sort of, using the platform, in the ways that would typically be used by someone who’s got a content marketing strategy, i.e. that they’re sharing content that is designed to generate brand awareness and build up trust and show people what it is you’ve got expertise in and the sorts of products that you sell or the services you offer, we’re happy to accept that because every piece of content comes with a call to action at the bottom of it, it comes with a bit of blurb about the business around it. So you can absolutely share content that’s designed to generate awareness about your services and your products. But we just sort of say no to something that’s purely been written just to sell content via affiliate links. Just because we want to keep the level of quality of the content on the platform, it relatively high, not every piece of content is going to be a masterpiece. But because of the partnerships that we have, it has to be of a certain level, otherwise, we won’t do it, the concept won’t be shared on those other platforms. It’s part of the partnership agreement that we have with these other platforms that the content has to be of a certain standard, I guess. So yes, if it’s normal content that’s just designed to build awareness, tell people who you are and what you what you’ve got expertise in. But know if it’s sort of, you know, top 10, SaaS products of 2022. And it’s just minimal content with just a link out for purely affiliate purposes.

Pat Yates 26:00

Got you. That makes total sense. So, let me ask this, let’s say that someone is really new to content, and they’re not getting, very good engagement, they come to you to try to change the trajectory on it. When someone comes in, I mean, do you have ability in referral partners and other people if they want to build assets? Let’s say that they want to start from scratch and they just don’t change? I need you to show me how to do this, basically, is that the right client? Or do they need to go and sort of learn that part and build the assets otherwise? Or can you give them something that start to finish to be able to work through that situation.

James Tennant 27:59

So we do offer that as well, if someone’s coming completely fresh, and just needs help, maybe they’ve tried in the past, that hasn’t worked, they’re not too sure where to start? We’re in terms of content creation, content strategy, we do offer that as well not through Converge. It’s more of a, if someone approaches us we’ll do it as a sort of strategy session outside of the platform, because the platform purely exists to promote the content that people have produced. So it’s slightly aside from that. But we have had businesses do that, who we help them, come up with a strategy, create the content, and then they use the platform as well to help promote that content afterwards. So that is something that we do offer. If it’s a piece of advice, I would say to if someone’s looking to, they’ve heard about this content marketing thing, and they want to start doing it because they see all the great results of businesses are getting, the best piece of advice I can give, is to spend as much time as possible in the early stages, researching as much as possible, your audience. So it’s not what you want to write or what you care about writing about. It’s what your audience is looking for in terms of content. So spend as much time as you possibly can. And you can use tools like Audiense, that’s where these on the end, or Spataro to get as much information about your audience as possible. So that when you do actually come to creating content, you know that the content you’re creating is what your audiences want, in the format they want it in. And when they want it as well. So that will give you the best possible start. And from all that research, that’s how you create the best pieces of content.

Pat Yates 29:39

That’s really great. So you take a more methodical look at what the market is going to be, what the assets are going to be and what they’re trying to get out of it. So you don’t spend a lot of time looking at channels that are going to work. It’s a great approach to it. So one of the questions so let’s say that a client comes in, they start working with Converge. They get these artists out there, how do they get the feedback? Do you have a system then that shows the engagement, do you have a way they can view how they’re performing? What is the feedback that they get to understand exactly how these campaigns are performing?

James Tennant 30:10

Yeah. So on the site, they’ll get, there’s a dashboard area that they can access once they’ve logged in, that gives them views and overall views and clicks. So you can see that per article or, in total, so with sort of all of the assets that you’ve published on the platform added together, and we’ll share that information in a graph, but also, as I say, individually, per article, and you can see that by day, week, month, or year as well. So that does two things. One, it gives you an immediate idea of the additional promotion that Converge has generated for your content. But also, it will help you figure out what types of content are working best. So you can concentrate more on either promoting that type of content more often with Converge, or maybe even creating that content more often. So if you see a piece that’s generated 10 times the views and engagement of another piece, it might be worth doing that more often. So there’s that feedback that we give, we also give a little bit of manual feedback as well, if we think we can offer a little bit of advice here and there about a piece of content that we will, when there is a process to the platform, when someone uploads a piece of content, it does go through a small editing process just for us to make sure that it’s not saying anything inflammatory, or it’s not a certain quality that’s maybe slightly below the standard that we would want, although we rarely have to deal with that as an issue. We will share a little bit of advice then as well. So, this is how you can make this slightly more engaging for your audience. Have you thought about coming at this topic from this angle, as well. So there’s a little bit of manual feedback from us on the piece of content, as well as the feedback you’ll get from the platform in terms of how many views and clicks each article is generated for you.

Pat Yates 31:57

That makes a lot of sense. So tell me about this. When I look at this from like a Quiet Light angle, if we’re looking at M&A and say that someone’s building a content site to eventually exit in the next year or two, or whatever it’s going to be, obviously continuing this consistent content is going to grow their overall visitors sort of, on a stack, because each one is continuing to perform better. Do you feel like that investing this amount of time and effort in what you guys do is going to raise someone’s valuation on their content site, because of the amount of people that they’re getting in? Has it made a significant difference in where people’s business a weak position in M&A? I don’t know, if you understand those tangible things, once you’re done with a client or once they’re in there, but how can that impact them when they want to exit eventually?

James Tennant 32:39

Well, I guess from the basic standpoint, the more content you promote, and the better the content that you promote, the more people that you’re going to be able to reach because of that content. From that yet, the more traffic that you’ll eventually get back to your website, the more people that will become engaged because of your content, or possible customers as well. So imagine all of the benefits that come from doing content marketing properly, increased awareness of who you are, more engagement on the content, and more customers further down the line. All of that, I’m assuming is going to have an impact on the valuation of a company. I guess even from a potentially a data perspective, if you have more people downloading or accessing content, sharing their data with you, I believe that’s probably quite a valuable asset to have even aside from paying customers. So yeah, it has a huge benefits any business that that’s producing content, because to be honest, as you pointed out very early on in this in this chat, if you’re spending all the time and money to create content that’s not actually generating any results, then it’s wasted time and wasted money.

Pat Yates 32:44

Makes a lot of sense. And here’s here’s another question, when someone comes in and works with you, should they be going out and still putting that content out there themselves? And if so, I want to make sure how do they avoid, for instance, contacting the same people? I mean, are there ways they understand exactly who you’re contacting? Or who they should or shouldn’t stay away from? How do they navigate that if they’re doing on their own too?

James Tennant 34:19

So yes, they should be doing it on their own as well. Definitely. You learn a lot from doing this on your own. Said, I fully understand we hear from industry every year when we do the report that the biggest reason they don’t promote their content enough is that they don’t have time. So I fully get that for a lot of businesses out there. A lot of content marketers out there, it might be very difficult to find the time to do it. So Converge exists to help those businesses but it also exists to help businesses that are doing the promotion. And our advice is always yes, do it yourself. You can learn a lot from doing it yourself. You can build up a really powerful network doing it yourself in regards to how to avoid reaching the same people, I don’t think that is an issue. I think that the more that the more often you can get in touch with this, they’ll reach the same people with your content, the more likely they are to actually engage with it. So, someone sees your content, once, you know, maybe the wrong time that they saw it, they might have just been logging off, they might have been scrolling through them. I’ve been using LinkedIn to message somebody, they saw your content, I don’t have time to read that now. But it looked interesting. If that’s the only time they ever saw that, they’ll never find it again. But if then they go back on and they see it again, okay, that I remember that I’ll click on it this time, I’ll read at this time. So there’ll be multiple touch-points that someone might need before they actually engage with a piece of content. So I wouldn’t worry too much about whether or not we’ve served it to that person, then you do as well, the more often you can do that, probably the better it is for the performance of that content. And as well, the way and again, I’m just talking specifically social media platforms here, because we do see that that’s the most popular where people promote their content online. The feeds are updated so quickly that if you share, and we share, the chances are the right audience might only see one of those. So it again, there’s no worry about, I will have seen that a couple of times, that’s going to turn them off from clicking onto it, the chances are, they’re probably only going to see it once or twice, and they need to see it once or twice anyway, to actually engage with the piece in the first place. So yes, do it yourself. 100%. Do it as often as you can get better at it. And don’t worry about reaching the same people that we reach, it’s probably better if you do.

Pat Yates 36:38

I guarantee Yeah, that’s a good point. I have learned so much from this today, because I don’t understand the content side as well, as far as posting, so a lot of content company. So I’ll see you come in from the backside. And these are really, really good and invaluable company. So I guess just to kind of sum this up. I mean, we’ve put so much information out here. If you were to give the 32nd pitch on what Converge can do for these content creators? What would that be if you compartmentalize it all?

James Tennant 37:06

Yeah, sure, Converge exists very simply to help your content reach significantly more of your target audience. So we will take your content once it’s published on our site, and serve it to more of the right people every single day, consistently. So if you’re looking to get more people to read or engage with your content, you can put on Coverage, and we guarantee that that will happen.

Pat Yates 37:30

That’s really great. That’s a great update. So James, that was great conversation. Let me ask you a couple more questions just for the fun of it today. So I like to ask you a couple of questions that would be kind of fun. Give us a book recommendation. What’s one of the last books that you read that you would absolutely recommend to people?

James Tennant 37:46

Are we talking fiction or nonfiction?

Pat Yates 37:49

It’s up to you. It can be either, some people just like to relax and read. Some people want to have business-driven reads? I don’t know. What do you think?

James Tennant 37:57

That’s a good question. I’ve heard a few decent ones recently. So, okay, one I read very recently that I really loved was How To Think Like a Roman Emperor. It’s a book on the stoic philosophy, stoicism, I got quite into that when I was at university, I did a degree in ancient history. And I learned about that then, and I’ve been a sort of a fairly big part of my life since then. And I’ve just read that book. It’s excellent. So if anyone’s looking to learn a bit more about that philosophy way of thinking on life, then I would fully recommend that book, it’s very easy to get into, you don’t need any prior knowledge beforehand. It was very well written.

Pat Yates 38:38

Great. And I guess final question, what would be a goal of yours in 2023, if you could achieve it, personal professional, whichever one it is?

James Tennant 38:48

Probably a bit of both personal and professional, personal just for my satisfaction and professional because it would help the business but we’d really love to, I’d really love to be able to deliver talks. So I’m looking to do some in-person talks on this topic of content amplification, because we get these reports every year. And the results that we get from are really interesting. And I think industry would be well, they did improve every year by the number of downloads that we get the report says people are interested in this topic. So I’d love to be able to deliver this and have these types of conversations that we’re having put in a face-to-face environment. So yeah, being on stage this year.

Pat Yates 39:25

I think there’s a lot of people out there that would like to watch a webinar understanding exactly what they could do for it. James, I really appreciate your time today coming on the podcast, an amazing business that helps a lot of people. And we’re looking forward to talking to you in the future as well. Thanks for coming in.

James Tennant 39:39

Thanks a lot for your time. It’s been a good chat.

Outro 39:43

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, on Twitter, and Instagram, and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.