12 - Mistakes in Marketing Ashley Segura Confesses Biggest Content Marketing Blunders

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
Welcome to this episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. I'm Jim Banks, your host, and I've got a fantastic guest on for you today, Ashley Segura, who I've known for quite a number of years. Ashley and I, we've traveled around a bit. We've spoken at various conferences at the same time, been on panels together in the past. Fantastic content marketer, and I'm really delighted to have you on the show today. Ashley, welcome to the show.

Ashley Segura [00:00:22]:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Jim Banks [00:00:24]:
You're so welcome. So, Ashley, whereabouts in the States are you based?

Ashley Segura [00:00:28]:
Yeah, I'm over in Bend, Oregon, so between some really beautiful mountains.

Jim Banks [00:00:33]:
Wow. What's weather like there now?

Ashley Segura [00:00:35]:
It's not great. It's, you know, we're coming out of winter, but winter likes to hang out for a while. So it's, it's cold and rainy, but tomorrow's supposed to be sunny and warm. So every day is very different. We're in high desert area, so it's, it's, each day is drastically different.

Jim Banks [00:00:52]:
So I've been trying to get Ashley on as a guest for a little while, and for various reasons, she's not been able to come on. So again, I'm delighted to have you on for this particular episode. Part of the reason that you weren't able to come on, you've been traveling around a lot, doing a lot of speaking, and I know again, like, that's how we met. We met when we spoke at similar conferences, but you've also set up a new business. So the business is called content Yum. Is that right?

Ashley Segura [00:01:17]:
Yes, content Yum.

Jim Banks [00:01:18]:
So talk to me a little bit about content Yum. What's it all about?

Ashley Segura [00:01:21]:
Yeah, definitely. So the idea behind content Yum is to provide a la carte content marketing services for whatever stage of the content creation journey that you're in. So say, for example, you have a team of in house writers. You don't need help with writing, but you do need help with the strategy on what to write next. That's where our topic ideation service comes in. From there we do SEO content briefs, which is going to be the optimized outline. The third is content writing, and the final is link building. So I wanted to create something that was really successful for any kind of brand, whether you're a large e commerce or you're a one man band who's trying to do everything on your own to where you can hop in, grab whatever service you need one time monthly.

Ashley Segura [00:02:05]:
There's no contracts, there's no commitments no sales calls or lengthy promote proposals. It's what you need when you need it, from a content marketing perspective of services that actually move the needle. So not just, you know, coming up with topic ideas that make sense for your brand, but topic ideas that will actually drive traffic to your site.

Jim Banks [00:02:26]:
So I know, I know you've been doing content marketing for an awful long time. I remember when you used to be part of the A team that went around with Semrush evangelizing for Semrush. Again, you must, you might. That must have been a fantastic job to travel the world with the other three ladies, right? Presenting about the product. And again, for me, it's something, when you've done something for such a long time as you have, I'm sure that there'll be an awful lot of people that will be like competing with you. And really all they are is like maybe some guy sitting at home in his house with a chat GPT account banging out content like left, right and center. How do you compete with that, Ash? What makes you different?

Ashley Segura [00:03:05]:
Great question. So we don't use AI for any of our work. We are still using humans, which I know is like shocking. And you're like, okay, well if you're using humans then it's got to be a huge price tag. And no, that's content. Yam is supposed to be accessible for any brand, whether you have a huge budget or this is coming out of your savings and you're investing in your own personal company. And so the AI atmosphere is very gentle right now, if that's the best word to say. AI, I think is a fantastic tool.

Ashley Segura [00:03:41]:
I use it as a co worker and I think everyone should use AI in some way, shape or form as a coworker or an assistant. But to rely on AI for your entire content creation process, from coming up with the topic idea to optimizing, creating an outline to then writing it, then publishing it, that it's just we are not there yet with AI. Maybe years from now, maybe we'll be there. But I have yet to see successful use cases of AI being used throughout the content journey and producing great results. And especially with this March update and all of it being, well, 99% of it being focused on spam and spammy content and spammy practices. It's a really fine line of those who are using AI to try and create great content versus those who are using AI to just create content. There are a lot of teams out there who are using AI to basically ideate something for them, but then they have a big human element that comes in and does the copy editing and really steers the ship and it's like, okay, that's one way to do it, certainly. But those who are just solely relying on AI, I'm just not seeing, seen any successful use cases of that.

Ashley Segura [00:04:59]:
And I'm also really hesitant to ever recommend something like that as a workflow because of this March update and how this is going to continue to pan out. I mean, we're seeing so many sites affected and most of it's from that, like last year, year and a half of mass producing content. It's kind of like the old link building spam days of, you know, it worked until it didn't work anymore. And I don't want to be on the side to where it just stops working. I rather keep going with what has historically worked well and continue to listen to these core updates and understand how we can continue as humans, SEOs and content marketers produce great content for our clients.

Jim Banks [00:05:38]:
Yeah, I always remember the early sort of days when there were an awful lot of like spam people that would create content. I mean, I remember talking to some friends and they basically said what they do is they created, they use like a mad lib to basically create 10,000 pages of content every day. Knowing that 5000 of them would get found immediately and the other 5000 would kind of stay in the index for a couple of months, they'd make a decent bit of money and then eventually like the network would get shut down, they start up again. And fine, if that's a business model, it worked very well for them. They made good money for a period of time. But again, I couldn't cope. I mean, I used to be an emailer, high volume emailer. Basically I was a spammer and I used to hate getting the kind of complaint emails that would come through from spamhaus and places like that.

Jim Banks [00:06:25]:
To the point I'm like, I don't want to do that anymore. Right. And again, I would hate to be on the receiving end of a manual penalty.

Ashley Segura [00:06:31]:
Oh, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:06:31]:
I think that would be the most horrible thing to experience. And again, I think some people that have adopted AI, right, they've hired an agency that uses AI extensively, right? They're paying for it now, right? They may not have paid a lot for the content at the beginning. They're certainly paying for the content now, right? In lost rankings and in some cases like invisibility on the kind of the search engine.

Ashley Segura [00:06:55]:
And look at how fast it was. I mean, this is from the helpful content updates to now there's still so many sites that were hit have not been able to recover or even come close to recovery. And now we have this core update rolling out. It just seems like the spamming practices are going to be hit a lot faster than what they used to be done and especially using AI. Google says, yeah, you can use AI to create content and they're quote unquote okay with it, but I'm just very hesitant for how long they're going to be okay with it because spammers are still going to spam and they're still going to use AI to create content even though all of this is happening. So what is this future going to look like? It's a big TBD.

Jim Banks [00:07:34]:
I use chat GPT very sparingly in the business. I mean, I use it quite extensively within the scope of the podcast. I mean, again, the podcast is a fairly new thing for me, something brand new. And I've been using some of the AI tools that help you chunk up some of your content. There's a tool called Cast Magic which I use quite a lot. It helps with YouTube titles, descriptions, it'll give you ideas for LinkedIn posts, emails, newsletters, all that type of stuff. Again, I don't just copy and paste. I tend to use this skill that I built up over time to then sort of adapt what they suggest and put my own spin on it to make sure that it will vibe with the audience that I have.

Jim Banks [00:08:17]:
Right, so you're heavily into content marketing, SEO, link building, pr, that type of stuff. Where do you see that particular space? Cause again, I mean, SEO has always taken a bit of a bashing over the years. Where do you think we are now with regards to SEO in content marketing generally?

Ashley Segura [00:08:36]:
I think we're in a really interesting atmosphere to where AI is the big topic of conversation because it is changing how people do SEO. People are relying solely on AI to optimize content or to dictate their entire SEO strategies. Other people are using AI as like what you're doing with your podcast as an assistant to kind of help flush things out a little bit further. And that's where I think we are close to finding the perfect balance of improving our workflows and our tasks and what our day looks like. I think within the next couple of years, what our days used to look like as SEOs and content marketers will change. And that will change from the tools that we use and the kind of tasks that we do. Because we have this. AI is amazing and can be very amazing.

Ashley Segura [00:09:32]:
We have this amazing new tool in our toolkit. So I, I don't know how and I'm not going to throw out any crazy predictions of like, you know, AI's.

Jim Banks [00:09:43]:
Oh, go on. Come on. Crazy predictions.

Ashley Segura [00:09:46]:
I don't think AI is going to take our jobs. I'll wash that prediction for sure. But I do think AI is going to take away a lot of our tasks and going to change the types of tasks that we do do. And that could be a really good thing so that we're allowed to put on more of that traditional marketing hat and get back to the basics that we've really lost and gone deep on the rails of just trying to optimize, optimize, optimize and like keep up to date with everything that's happening and try this new strategy and try this new strategy that we forgot to pay attention to user intent we forgot to dictate entire strategies around user intent, which is literally the foundation of good traditional marketing is to promote your service to your potential consumer, your different Personas, tell them why they need it, what makes you special, and also address their issues using your brand to do so and so. I dont know. Well, theres a lot to come, but I think our tasks as SEOs and content marketers is definitely going to change over the next few years.

Jim Banks [00:10:53]:
So, Ashley, Im pretty confident that you can answer this for me because this is something that is, has been bugging me for such a long time. I mean, I work primarily with ecommerce businesses that run on Shopify. Thats the strap line that I use for my agency. And part of the reason for that is I was getting a lot of approaches from clients that were just not really going to be a good fit for me. So I said, well, lets just focus on one thing. That doesnt mean that we dont work with people that dont run on shopify and everything else, but its just like weve drilled into it. One of the problems in the e commerce space and that direct to consumer sort of selling products is this kind of term called UGC. User generated content is bandied around a huge amount.

Jim Banks [00:11:36]:
Right. And again, I think of a UGC piece of content as something where somebody who is one of your customers has made a video or given you some sort of audio podcast or whatever it might be, or audio sound bite for you to then use in your ad copy or on your page as a testimony or something like that. So many of the ugcs to me are actors. They're people that, you know, again, like you see all these beautiful young, slim females kind of advertising these products for skincare. It's like, you don't need to put anything on your skin. Your skin is fine, right? But they make these videos. And again, I think a lot of people fall into it. And basically, so what is UGC to you? What do you think of UGC?

Ashley Segura [00:12:20]:
So first thing I think of is Instagram. Really, it's, it's the people who are brand advocates without intentionally being a brand advocate. So, um, let's take Nike, for example. I live in the Pacific Northwest. I'm a big fan of Nike. I will always choose Nike over adidas. Like, it's just I love the brand. And so when I wear any of my nikes, I'll take a picture and I'll tag them.

Ashley Segura [00:12:48]:
And I hope that one day, it has yet to happen, but I hope that one day Nike will share one of my images of me wearing their shoes or wearing their shirt or something just because I love the brand so much. So if the brand were to do that for me as a consumer, I would fall in love with the brand even more because now I feel like, oh, they see me and I already have this, like, this one sided relationship with them. Now it's a two sided relationship. So when I think of user generated content, I think of myself in that scenario of naturally posting this content with the hopes that maybe a brand will look at me and share it too, or even reach out to me and be like, hey, love the pic, thanks for using it.

Jim Banks [00:13:29]:
Or send you some news.

Ashley Segura [00:13:30]:
I mean, that'd be great. That's really what I'm going for. But I'll take a shout out too. But from the brand perspective, user generated content is identifying those people who are doing that and are tagging your brand, hashtagging your brand, or worse, they, they aren't doing either of it. And you have to, like, dig deep to try and find them. But it's, it's these real people who are posting on their personal channels. Yes, they can totally be influencers. I'm not talking about that like Khloe Kardashians of the world.

Ashley Segura [00:14:02]:
I'm talking about like, you know, micro influencers. That's a plus. But from a brand perspective, it's identifying who those people are looking at, the kind of content they're creating, how they're displaying your product, how they're talking about your service, what's the sentiment behind it? Or from a Nike example, where am I when I'm taking those photos? In studying that whole concept, which can help me dictate what kind of content I should create as a brand next, because of these users, these brand advocates who are creating content for my product. So yes, you can do influencer partnership, but I like to look at this from an even more strategic angle and understand, okay, if they're creating it on a mountain somewhere, then maybe we should do an ad with someone wearing nikes, a regular person on a mountain. People might like that.

Jim Banks [00:14:54]:
Yeah. Because I think, I think one of the things that's challenging is that there's, there needs to be disclosure of some form of like, you know, whether it's compensation. They gave me the product to try. It's a, it's a true review based upon my feedback, my, my feelings, rather than. They told me to talk nicely about it. Right? Again, I mean, I've got a, a client and they, they are basically offering clients $100 off their, their kind of subscription if they leave a five star review on Google, which again, you might say, well, that seems a bit disingenuous, but they've had tons of people doing it, right, and that will obviously help them win new business. So again, I'm kind of like, on the one hand, I think it's a bit, a bit of a, you know, I'm not really convinced that that's a good thing to do, but at the same time it's working. Lots of people are doing it right.

Jim Banks [00:15:45]:
You know, whereas if you kind of just leave them to naturally and organically leave reviews and ratings and whatever else, never going to happen. Right? I mean, again, I've been running the podcast now for ten weeks. I'm desperate to get people to leave reviews. And so again, more, I'm more, I'm more interested in just getting feedback on what to change. Right? Again, five star, fantastic. But you know, I'm much more interested in knowing what some of the people think of the podcast episode format, content, style, guests, etc, etcetera. Right? Hence I'm keen for people to leave reviews. I mean, I've had so many friends and people, again, people I don't know, like send me messages privately to say, you know, I was listening to an episode at the gym, I was on a treadmill, blah, blah, blah, it's great.

Jim Banks [00:16:32]:
And I'm like, fantastic. That's exactly what the sort of stuff I want to hear. But I'd like other people to hear about that. Right. Rather than me hearing about it.

Ashley Segura [00:16:40]:
Yeah, I think you can. But the biggest way to do so is to simply ask, but also be prepared for what kind of commentary that you get. So if you're looking for that criticism, the constructive criticism. I mean, it could be as simple as sending the link out to people on LinkedIn that you have established relationships, be like, hey, can you listen to an episode and kind of tear it up? For me, that's something that we did with content. Yum. Before we launched is we reached out to some of our previous customers from our other content agency that's more on the technical side, that just focuses on tech content audits. And we're like, hey, we're launching this new company. We've got four services.

Ashley Segura [00:17:23]:
Pick which one you want and we're going to do it for you for free. And please give us honest, raw feedback on it. And because of doing that, we reworked two out of four of our products entirely based on that feedback of like, oh, this is a great idea to add this bit, or oh, people are actually more concerned about this section. So let's dive into the data here. And so you've got to be open and willing to hear it because sometimes it will be very raw, especially online. But just simply asking, asking industry peers is a great way to start.

Jim Banks [00:17:57]:
That's brilliant. I love that. Yeah, I mean, just in terms of I got the thickest skin going. I used to sell insurance door to door for a living for twelve years. So if anyone can go cold calling, knocking on doors and take the rejection that comes from that, I'm okay with somebody going, jim, I thought your podcast sucks and I hated it. Again, I'd much rather people were brutal and honest rather than blowing smoke up my backside and telling it was fantastic if that's not what they thought. Because ultimately, like I said, I'm doing this because I love the industry. It's been great to me.

Jim Banks [00:18:31]:
I've made some great friends, people like yourself over the years. But at the same time I want to see the industry continue to evolve and it's, again, it's not all rainbows and flowers. Sometimes it can be tough as an industry to work in. So if you were like, let's say you're 15 years ago, Ashley, just coming into the industry, what would you want people to tell you the industry was all about if you were going to come in and start a career in digital marketing content market?

Ashley Segura [00:18:58]:
That is a great question. It's hard to pinpoint one, but honestly, the very first one that comes to mind is relationships. Every single pivotal moment of my 14 year career in digital marketing now has been based on a relationship in ways that my very first gig was from my insurance agent. I was having a conversation with him about I just graduated college and I no longer needed insurance for my apartment that I was running and just had a full on conversation with them. And he's like, oh, well, what are you going to do next? I was like, well, this is what I've been studying, this is what I think I want to do. And he's like, well, could you create a website? And said, yeah, sure, I can do that. Went and figured out how to do WordPress, and then from there he introduced me to this insurance group of California. And then that was my first speaking engagement.

Ashley Segura [00:19:56]:
And then I met people there who now became more clients and then we into the chiropractic version of this. And so a lot of the business that I've been able to have and a lot of the opportunities have all spawned from having conversations with people and having conversations in real life and putting myself out there saying yes to a lot of things and then figuring it out. I know that's usually the backwards, you want to figure it out and be an absolute pro and then dive in. And that's not what my journey was. And I know that that's not what a lot of other people's journey in this industry has been. It's been a lot of yes and then figure it out. I think this is a very forgiving industry in that sense that you do have the ability to figure things out if you do say yes to something that maybe is a little over your head. There's so many resources now between not just courses but the YouTube videos, the amount of data and tools that we have access to, so many tools that give you tutorials and have great customer support to walk you through it.

Ashley Segura [00:21:00]:
Um, so, yeah, really leaning into relationships and putting yourself out there and not being afraid to say yes to things that are maybe a little bit over your head because I can almost guarantee that for every single niche within digital marketing, there's already resources out there to help you learn how to do it.

Jim Banks [00:21:18]:
Because that's always one of the things that's bugged me the most about tools like answer the public or keyword research tools of all shapes and sizes. Right? I mean, I know Semrush has a great keyword research tool, spyfu, for paid search. And again, there's hundreds and hundreds of tools out there that you can do keyword research on. And it's absolutely essential if you're going to create a piece of content that you need to try and sort of focus on ensuring that it's relevant and there is some volume to it. I think the problem with some of these tools is quite often you're looking at historical data, right? So sometimes it's. And everyone has access to the same tool. So if you type in a particular term, everyone gets the same. You have a head term, you type that into the tool, and then you have all the suggestions from there.

Jim Banks [00:22:10]:
So again, answer the public. We'll give you the all the question ones and all that sort of stuff, but it's like everyone gets the same data. And so I've had huge successes with some individual projects where it was like, I called it a unicorn keyword, right? I was the only person that had it. Nobody else was buying it, so it was incredibly cheap because nobody else knew what it was. And I made a ton of money on the back of doing nothing other than paying my credit card. Yeah. And I think when you look at things like Google Ads now, they've shut down the doors of that innovation. They restricted the ability for you to be able to have, you know, misspellings and all that sort of stuff, which, again, used to be the bread and butter for an affiliate marketer.

Jim Banks [00:22:48]:
You could kind of go, well, this is the brand, right? But I can find 25 variations of how people might sell car insurance in Montana or whatever it might be. There'll be so many ways that they will make mistakes. Right? They'll. They'll include spaces. Not include spaces. Spell the word insurance with double NSS, all sorts of different permutations, and those all used to be individual keywords, whereas now it's just bundled into one kind of term, so it's more expensive for everyone. Right. And that's something that really bothers me a lot about these tools, is that there are, again, there's no sort of way of being able to look ahead.

Jim Banks [00:23:27]:
Everything is looking backwards. Do you have any sort of, like, ideas and suggestions on how you can come up with something that's innovative and creative that other people are not doing? How do you kind of go about that ideation?

Ashley Segura [00:23:38]:
Yeah, that's. That's a really great question and something that takes a lot of manual work. There's no easy answer for this. Um, so starting with going and looking on Google directly as a user to understand what's currently ranking and visually seeing how things are formatted, what kind of content they're including, what information they're addressing in it, to understand at that moment, what's Google's understanding of the user intent based on what they're populating, as well as what kind of information is actually connecting with people from there to make it unique. It's like, okay, so from, let's take the top ten ranking articles on a specific term. From there, I can identify a pretty decent heading structure of, all right, this is definitely the information that I need to include, but how can I be unique in this? That's when I'll go and use other tools in like Semrush's topic research tool to identify what are all the questions that people are asking around this. There's lots of times where I'll find really unique questions that none of the top ten ranking articles are including. They're not addressing that question at all.

Ashley Segura [00:24:48]:
It's like, okay, so I know to include a few sentences that make sure to address this and then kind of repeating that exercise. I know a lot of people are now using this with chat GPT. They'll go to chat GPT and be like, here's the outline of a piece of content that I'm going to write. What else should I include in it? And that'll also give you some other ideas of, you know, it's the, it's kind of the similar concept of frequently asked questions like, but diving way deeper to understand where do you have the opportunity to create something unique versus what's currently ranking while still optimizing and positioning yourself safe enough to where you have the ability to stand up at the competition, but you're still something special.

Jim Banks [00:25:29]:
The regulators in the states are getting quite hurt about some of the review sites because there's loads of, again, if you type in reviews of top ten DSLR cameras or something like that, there's really no brands on there. It's all comparison sites and publishers that have got brand review sites and things like that, typically with affiliate links and so on. And the reality of it is, in a lot of cases, they've not even touched the product. If I want to read a review, I want to know that the person that's reviewing it has actually used the product in the field or in whatever kind of like format it might be. Right? So again, generally speaking, if I'm recommending and referring links to tools in, say, SEO or PPC or whatever it might be, these are all tools that I've used and I'm trying to help people to get the same level of expertise that I have by using the same tools that I use.

Ashley Segura [00:26:20]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:26:20]:
So to your point about the kind of Nike sneakers, I mean, you know, if somebody's like a long distance runner, there's a very big difference between sort of sneakers specifically for long distance running versus ones that are good for walking around the shop. I mean, there's massive, massive difference. You need to understand. I'd much rather listen to a review or read a review from somebody who's like a two hour, ten minute marathon runner than somebody that is 500 pounds in weight and has never run, apart from running to the fridge. That's as far as they've got in terms of their exercise experience. Right. I think it's dangerous because I think so many of these places now, all of a sudden they're basically saying, yes, we've reviewed this product, we have actually touched it. Whereas again, I think a lot of people have been able to call bullshit on saying, well, actually you've left a review and you haven't actually review the product at all.

Ashley Segura [00:27:09]:
Yeah, from a user perspective, it's really to see those websites and to go to them and see like the couple of paragraphs where they talk about what the pros and cons are, and then you go to the next result on Google because you're still confused at what to buy and it's almost the same exact copy. It's clear that those people, or those brands or whoever they are, do not have the actual product and they're just producing content. Where this becomes unique is video content. When you're able to see someone on a post, and this could be blog post, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, like whatever medium that looks like for you, when you're able to have a video with the product, then you're building trust right off the bat. I know for sure that you have the products because I can visually see that you have it. You're also building authority with it because you're positioning yourself as a professional reviewer. You're not just throwing up a post with a bunch of content of pros and cons that are definitely copy and pasted or researched from the top, the top ranking post. You can also really make yourself unique in this space by adding video.

Ashley Segura [00:28:17]:
If so many of the current ranking articles for these review sites are just a bunch of content and imagery, then you should definitely have a video. Like, that's a big screen, that this is where you can be unique. And people are going to watch that video. They may not watch all of it. Probably just going to go to that one section where you open it up so that they can see what, when it's put together, what it actually looks like. But understanding user intents is where this, like, fully circles back. If you know that someone is trying to decide between whether they should buy a PC or a Mac, you should show them the difference between the two. Really show them the difference between the two, because this is an expensive decision that they're making.

Ashley Segura [00:29:00]:
They could be making this for either school, for work, or for personal. And you should have content that addresses each of those three stages so it addresses the user intent and really create a fully flushed up piece of content for each of those intents.

Jim Banks [00:29:15]:
I think it was Tim Ash I had on as a guest, and he was saying he was so pleased that my podcast was called bad decisions with Jim Banks because we all make them, right. And I think it's very easy to just assume that, you know, people decide to kind of set up a business. Its hugely successful, grows to like ten, eight figures, and they sell it for like $100 million and theyre driving around in bentleys. Right. Its kind of, you know, the reality of running a business is very different in that regard. And like I said, I want to try and help people avoid making the same mistakes that maybe weve made by helping to kind of steer them away from the cliff. So can you give us an example of any bad decisions you made in business that you go, wow, with hindsight, that was a horrible decision that I made.

Ashley Segura [00:29:59]:
There's a few, I'll be honest. I mean, as business owners, that's the name of the game is you build something out, you hope everyone will love it and buy it. And then, like you said, you either sell or you just sit rich and happy in your millions in whichever fashion that looks like. I'll take a couple examples here. One, since we're talking about AI, is the reliance on AI personally for my business, especially for launching a business. I really relied heavily on AI to make sure am I checking all the right boxes. It's been a while since I've launched. It's been four years since I launched my last company.

Ashley Segura [00:30:45]:
So what has changed since then? And I would go to AI to have these quote unquote strategy conversations and to make sure am I feeling in all the boxes. And I found myself getting to a point to where I was struggling to make a decision. If I had gone to AI and spent an hour researching everything and, like, really diving into it and almost losing my marketing brain, my entrepreneur brain in that process. And that's what I'm afraid a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs are going to start to dive into. They're going to be so reliant on AI that they're going to miss the pulse of being a business owner. And that's where we have to really work hard to maintain and remember that these are just tools in our toolkit. We cannot rely on them. We're business owners for a reason.

Ashley Segura [00:31:37]:
We have something to bring to the table that we think is really important and to not lose grasp of what that is.

Jim Banks [00:31:42]:
Yeah, because I think I see the mistake a lot of people make is they try and do everything themselves rather than enlisting the help of experts in a particular discipline. So, you know, again, when it comes to things like design, sure, I could fire up canva. I could kind of do all sorts of different things, create logos. I could kind of go, hey, I can go to AI and go create me a logo. At the moment, I don't, I don't have a logo for bad decisions with Jim Banks. I want to create one. But it's like, again, I could have gone the cheap, easy route and gone down AI. But I thought, you know what, I'm just going to leave it a little while because I think once you kind of get something, I want to go and get hats made and t shirts and all that sort of stuff.

Jim Banks [00:32:21]:
And it becomes then, you know, you've gone down a rabbit hole very quickly. So for me, it's like, again, I'm still early enough into the kind of the experience to be able to kind of hang fire on that until a little bit later on. But at some point in time, you know, there will be a point where I'm saying, okay, I need to have a media kit and I need to have all the stats to say, well, this is how many views we get and how many downloads and all that sort of stuff, the demographics of the audience. Because if we are going to say, well, eventually you want to get to the point where your podcast, you can monetize it through sponsors or whatever it might be. People are going to do that if they feel that the value in your audience is the sort of audience that will vibe with what, what it is that they're looking to promote themselves. So, so for me, that's where it's quite important. I think I can put my marketing head on as a podcast and I've got a different outlook on it than I think a lot of people that maybe have started podcasts, a lot of people are starting podcasts and they're not really thinking further ahead. I mean, I'm thinking of this as a much, much bigger podcast proposition than it is now because everything starts from like zero.

Jim Banks [00:33:30]:
We all start with zero followers, zero interest at all. So for me, it's very much a case of I always try and begin with the end in mind and say, well, okay, let's project it forward. Let's look a year, two years out. What does it look like then? And you almost like, walk it back to where you are now. And I think so much of it will be governed by, like I said, the quality of the content that you put out there, the quality of the guests you have, if you're going to have guests, if you do solo stuff. Interesting enough. I was driving up to see my grandson at the weekend. He turned 25, and I was listening to a podcast on the way there.

Jim Banks [00:34:05]:
And one of the guys that talking on the podcast that I was listening to, he was basically saying what he does is he has his interview and then he puts another piece of content. It's like a shorter form. So if you have a 45 minutes to an hour long guest interview, that's great, fantastic. But what he also does is he does a shorter one that might be five to seven minutes long. That could be like just a small tip sound bite, whatever it might be, because then that way you've got another opportunity to boost your followers, your viewers, your listeners, everything like that. And I'm like, what a genius idea. So I've stolen that. I'm definitely going to be a short form podcast related content that won't necessarily be a guest.

Jim Banks [00:34:47]:
It'll be typically one to one. Or I may well grab a rather than a 62nd short or TikTok or whatever it might be. I could pull a seven or eight minute snippet out of one of the episodes and make that the kind of the piece in between. Right? So it's repurposing something that you've created already or an idea that you've got together, and you can create lots of five minute episodes pretty quickly, rather than the time it takes to get a guest on board, guest intake, record, edit, publish, promote. So again, I think for me, that's one of the things that I've really kind of taken on board in the last week or so, which I think will be helpful for probably me and any other people that are thinking of creating podcasts. So many of my friends are now, hey, I've got a podcast. I'm creating a podcast. I've got another one coming up.

Jim Banks [00:35:36]:
And you said to me before we came on, you got a podcast. So tell us a little bit about the idea behind that.

Ashley Segura [00:35:41]:
Yeah, definitely. So podcast is launching the beginning of April. It's called content in the kitchen. And the idea is to talk to people of all different content levels. So from bloggers to in house, one content teams to cmos and understand what their content journey looks like and talking about everything from big technical topics like internal link strategies and Google core updates to how do you be a one person content team? How do you manage that mentally? How do you manage that from a project management standpoint? And so the idea behind the podcast is to really talk to people at various levels of content and understand what their journey looks like in trying to produce content and get that brand exposure.

Jim Banks [00:36:25]:
Well, that sounds like a fantastic idea and I look forward to making that one of my subscriptions. And you'll have a fan for sure in thank you. Ashley, thanks an awful lot for being a guest on this episode. I really appreciate you taking time out of what must be a very busy schedule for you with your new business and everything else. Is there one sort of place where you would like people, if they want to reach out to you to talk about content marketing or strategies and so on? Is there one particular place where people would be better to reach you rather than somewhere else?

Ashley Segura [00:36:55]:
Yeah, certainly LinkedIn is the best spot. You can find me LinkedIn.com ashleyward 90 is, I believe, what the URL is, but you can also just search Ashley Segura and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is definitely a great place to have a conversation and I always love jumping on calls and just talking content strategies with people.

Jim Banks [00:37:14]:
Fantastic. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for being a guest. And at some point in time, once you launch your podcast, I'd love to have you back so you can maybe talk about the experience of what it's like to be be a podcaster and what you've learned from that. Because again, for me, as much as this is about digital marketing, I see podcasts being such an integral part of that whole thing. I think so many more people are now creating podcasts because they see it adds a lot of value to their overall brand asset library. It just becomes another piece of content that sort of sits in there sort of arsenal of content.

Ashley Segura [00:37:48]:
Yeah, definitely. Completely agreed and would love to come.

Jim Banks [00:37:50]:
Back on super talk to you then.