Ingredients of a Successful Content Marketing recipe with chef Andy Crestodina

Welcome to the podcast! I’m Shane Barker, your host at Shane Barker’s Marketing Madness Podcast. I’m thrilled to introduce the leading content marketer and top-rated speaker, Andy Crestodina, who will share his recipe for successful content marketing campaigns.

Andy, who describes himself as just an ordinary guy (which, between us, is untrue—hashtag fake news), is the founder of Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning, 38-person web design and development firm in Chicago. He has helped more than 1,000 businesses with effective marketing strategies and marketing voice. So, stay tuned to learn the key ingredients for a successful content marketing program. His tips may just provide you with the magic ingredients you need to succeed in your own campaigns. I hope you guys love Andy as much as I do.

All right, you guys! Here we are with Andy Crestodina—blogger, speaker, and content creator. We were just talking about how he’s trying to act like he’s just an all-around normal guy, even though we see him everywhere—at conferences, on social media, and in his book. We’ll be diving into some fun details here in a bit.

But Andy, what’s going on, bud? How are you doing? We were just talking about this… You had your conference this week, right?

Who’d you guys have out there?

Yeah, that’s awesome. And he sounds like it’s kind of I was, I also like the fact they also talk about where they’re from as well, right? You definitely had a nice mix of people from all over the United States. So that’s kind of cool. So tell me about this. You’ve been, you’ve been doing this, this content thing. You’ve been in the space of digital space for what, 18 years now. How long has it been?

Yeah, you always feel that way, right? It’s like, “If I’d started five years ago…” I feel the same way about real estate—if I’d bought a house 10 years ago or done something else back then, you always think you missed out. You never feel caught up unless you’re the first person. But I know I can catch up, and I think that’s what’s awesome about today: there’s so much happening with content and creation—so many cool things evolving. That’s why I tell clients, influencers, and the people I work with that it’s never too late. Some people jumped on the scene a year or two ago, and they’re already big. It really depends on your service, your product, and how you present it to the world.

I’ve been doing this for about 20 years, though I was in denial for a long time. I like to say I’m great at marketing, but I’m terrible at math—I’d be a terrible accountant. One time when I still had an office at my house (I do have one there, but I also have another office), my wife walked by and heard me say I’d been doing this for 12 years. I was like, “Yeah, it’s been at least 10 or 12 years.” She goes, “It’s been 20—you’re 43 years old.” I realized I’d been off by eight years in just a two-minute conversation. So I’m in denial, especially about my age. But my wife keeps me straight. Shout out to my wife—thank you for everything you do!

Let’s talk about content marketing, specifically the different campaigns you run. If you have a client and you’re putting together a campaign, what are some of the pillars? How do you approach it if I call and say, “Hey Andy, I want to be a superstar, a thought leader. I want to get my product out there.” What’s your process for that?

I love that so, and that’s—you know, we obviously do a lot of the extra roundups and stuff like that. And that’s one of the things that, you know, it’s—I was just interviewed by Landon Ray, founder of Entrepreneur, and one of the things he’s like, “Hey, if you could tell whatever you know, Shane from 30 years ago, or whatever, 35 years ago, four years ago—I mean, no, a long time ago—like, you know, what would you do differently? Like, what would you tell that Shane?”

And for me, it’s—I do more of it now, like the networking and the expert roundups somewhere. I get to know people and chat. And obviously we’re doing, like, podcasts and all the other fun stuff. But it’s only in the last probably 5, 10 years, or maybe the last seven years, that I started doing that. I really wish when I was younger, I would have done more of that networking and that kind of thing.

It’s one of those things that I preach to my son. So my son’s in his second year of college, and I tell him, like, “Hey, listen, do the networking thing, like, join a fraternity, do these types of things, because you really don’t understand the value of that, of having those networks, you know?” And like I said, I feel like my first five or 10 years, I just kind of felt like, “Hell, I can figure it out, I’ve got it, you know, I can do this on my own.” And it’s just such a shallow way of thinking, you know?

It’s because now I meet all these awesome people, and when you go to events and you speak, and you do all this cool stuff, it’s fun. And the networking—you just can’t, you can’t—I mean, that’s what it is. That’s how we get to where we’re going, is literally networking, getting to know people. You have the media, other speakers, they’ve got this going on, they’ve got that going on. I mean, it just doesn’t get any better. And I just—it’s just one of those things. It’s like, the collaboration there can be phenomenal.

Yeah, it is. You know, when it doesn’t feel like a job, you feel blessed, you know? I mean, that’s—I don’t know, I don’t know. I think that’s a big part of the whole thing. Like I said, that networking side of things is really something else. You mentioned that, and it really resonated with me too. I’m trying to think—I’ll probably remember here in a minute.

But so tell me a little bit about—you guys wrote a book, right? So let’s go into that a bit. I honestly haven’t read it yet—not saying I’m not going to. If I don’t have it, you’ll send me one? (Absolutely.) Look, that’s what I’m talking about.

I love the way that you put that together and how you did that. I think that’s so very original. Because, once again, it’s literally a dissertation of all the stuff that you’ve learned over, you know, 18, 19, 20 years in the space.

So I did remember—this is what I thought was really interesting: one of the things you said before is also having original content, right? Some kind of a study or something that you’ve done, because there’s obviously the value of having that, and then there’s obviously the SEO value of people linking to it and all that kind of stuff. So I think that’s one of the things. And I think people don’t—like, let’s touch on that.

How would you recommend—if I was going to do, or if somebody, or some business, was going to do some kind of an original study—how you go about that? Obviously, I know it depends on the company. But what would you recommend for somebody to do? Like, listen, if you’ve got to come out with something, obviously, you need some analytics, right? We need some data there. So give us a little bit of an idea: if you were going to help a client put together some original content like that, how would you go about it?

Yeah, I love that. It’s so funny, because on our side, we haven’t really done much in terms of original research. I cite a lot of other people, and I do that for multiple reasons. I cite them, then I reach out to them and say, “Hey, I just cited you here,” and we share it—so there’s value in that. But the original side of things, that’s something I’d have to say if I’m lacking in anything, that would definitely be it.

There we go. This is the reason why I record these kinds of things—I can come back and look at them later on. So listen, all right, guys, let’s do what we’re gonna do. Yeah, anyone can do it. Awesome. Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, good.

Okay, so your book—I kind of skipped over that real quick. That’s literally your lifetime work. Tell me a little bit more about it. How long did it take you to put that together? How many pages is it?

Yeah, it’s already hard enough to do one, and now you’re just—I mean, I guess that’s the hard part. So hopefully, I talked about maybe six months ago that I was going to write a book about influencer marketing. But, you know, the issue is—like you just touched on—everything changes so fast. You know, it’s like if I start talking about a software or something that’s done, by the time the book comes out, there’ll be a new way to do it, right?

So you’ve got to think of something that’s evergreen, something that won’t go away. That way, you can hopefully build a legacy through the book or whatever. But it’s interesting. And so each year…

Yeah, it does. I mean, for me, what you’ve done makes sense, because I’ve already got a lot of that content out there. But starting something from scratch—like, I’m good at 800, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 words. But once we get past that, we run into this area where Shane looks around and sees squirrels, and, you know, I just kind of get distracted.

So it’s about trying to focus, and trying to—I’ve got good outlines together and stuff like that, but I think that makes a lot of sense because that content’s already out there and can just be tightened up and turned into something. The annual thing makes me a little nervous, because I haven’t even done one yet. But okay, we’ll figure that out.

So, tell me about how you started your agency. How did that lead to Orbit Media? How long ago was that—was it 18 years ago?

Which is kind of funny. So you guys are still doing websites, and still do all that.

Yeah, that’s—I tell you, man, it’s so funny because this is why I like to have these kinds of conversations: I stay as far away from websites as I can. Like, if somebody comes in saying, “Just do websites,” I’m literally like, “Please step back. This is not going to be a good relationship. We’re probably gonna—yeah, just step away. Call Andy.” That’s me. I’ll get under the table if they see me. And yeah, I love it, actually—I do. But that’s because you guys have been doing it, and you’ve been successful at it.

It’s one of those things: once you get good processes in place—like anything—it’s good. But I’ve had so many experiences. We used to do both sides back in the day, and we still do websites for a long-time client if they come in saying, “Hey, will you help us out with the website?” I’ll say, “Yeah, no problem.” But we’re not doing $50,000 or $100,000 websites, because for me, just thinking about being in the middle of that is a scary place. There are so many different things going on. We can do it, but it’s just not where I want to spend my time. Over time, I realized websites never end—you have to set them up with contracts, letting people know, “Hey, we’ll only do 10,000 revisions,” or whatever the numbers are, give or take a zero or two.

That’s what’s interesting about it—it’s just one of those deals, man. Websites… everyone…

Yeah, there definitely is. It definitely is—I’ve always fought with that, you know, having an agency. It’s like, having an agency is one thing, and it’s great, it’s fun. I mean, we’re getting in our 20s, you know, so obviously there’s a lot of stuff we’ve put in place to be where we’re at today.

But I also struggle with the idea of getting a job—actually having a job—not so much anymore, but it used to be like, these big companies would come along and try to pull me away, and I’d wonder, “God, is that a better way to go?” Of course, I’d ask my wife, and she’d say, “Sounds like steady money, let’s do it—let’s join a team.”

For me, especially early on, it was one of those things where I just didn’t know if I wanted to do that. The agency thing was always really interesting to me. I just enjoyed the space—there’s always something to learn, right? I feel like there’s always something new, and there are so many great people in the space. I don’t know, I feel really lucky about where we’re at today. I feel like good things have happened for sure.

It is. I think that’s what I enjoy about it—you just never know what you’re gonna get. I mean, it’s kind of like my wife, who just became a nurse about a year ago. She was doing sales and said, “I want to be a nurse.” And she’s a phenomenal nurse—my wife, whom I’ve mentioned twice so far, is super amazing. But yeah, it’s one of those things: you look at it, and she really enjoys it. She works with preemie babies, but she really enjoys the ER side of things because she just never knows what’s going to come through that door. And marketing is not quite that crazy. (Like a NICU nurse?) Like NICU, yeah, yeah.

So, she works with preemie babies. And my mom was a nurse for 35 years—my aunt was too, like everybody in my family has been nurses at some point. And my wife just said, “Hey, one day I want to be a nurse.” I was like, “Awesome.” And then she saw the cost—a one-year program—and I said, “And that’s not awesome.” No, I’m just kidding. Maybe that was a good decision, for sure.

But what I’m saying is, you know, the ER side of things—and I love that about marketing—is that there’s always something new to learn. Some people dive really deep, and there’s so much content out there. I used the analogy of drinking out of a water hose, right? As a business owner, you try to absorb as much as you can. I was interviewed last week, and one of the questions was, “Do you think it’s easy to be a business owner?” I said, “No. There are softwares and tools that help, but it’s extremely difficult. I can’t imagine if I were to start a business and had to learn everything I know. I’d have to be everything I know.” But you have to jump into that space and hire the right people.

It was an interesting time because you can’t ignore digital—you can’t ignore online. It’s both interesting and scary at the same time. If I were a business owner, I’d be a little worried about it, just because, you know, where do you spend your money? And, yeah, I don’t know—it’s just kind of a crazy little…

Yeah, if it doesn’t, we’re gonna do something else, because that’s where they’re hiring you, right? I mean, it’s the whole idea: it’s like, “Listen, you have some expertise that I don’t have, and we’re gonna try some stuff.” And that’s the thing.

So I think it’s all about proper expectation, and I think that’s where a lot of people miss that mark when it comes to working with clients. But it also applies to a number of different things. For me, when I talk to clients, it’s kind of like what you just said—I set the expectation. Like, “Listen, here’s the deal. This is what I think is going to work, and this is the reason why—because this is what we’ve done for this client. And once again, I can’t guarantee that it’s going to work, right? But the idea is we’re going to try a few different things. Because if I just knocked it out of the park on the first one, I would love to tell you that I do that all the time, but it doesn’t happen that way. I mean, you’ve got to figure it out, right?”

I mean, we as strategists also have to look at, “Okay, there’s 15, 20, 50, 1,000 different things that we could do for the client, but what do we need to do?” Right? And so I think that’s having that proper expectation of, like, “What are your goals? What are we looking at here, and what do we need to do to get there?” You know, I always ask my clients—I have qualifying questions, obviously. And I just say one thing: I say, “What would be a home run? Like, what would you see in your mind as a big, big win?” And then, great, we can put that up there and say, “Hey, this is what we’re shooting for.”

Yeah, it’s interesting. And like I said, I do enjoy the daily hassle and helping businesses, too—I pride myself on that. And, you know, I’ve had a lot of people come to me and say, “Hey, this is my last $5,000,” and I’ll say, “Don’t give it to me. I don’t—don’t give that to anybody. You really got to look at your business,” right? I mean, honestly, I’ve had people get offended. They’re like, “You’re not gonna take my last five grand?” I said, “No, that’s terrible. I don’t want to be that person.”

Because then what happens is, you don’t think about the person before me that you gave $100,000 to—you get pissed off at Shane that took your last $5,000. Like, no, no. Let me take you to dinner or something. Keep your money. I always try to offer some free help and say, “Listen, let me send you guys in the right direction,” right? But I don’t want to be the person taking that last bit of money from you.

I mean, it’s because I’ve always had businesses, and I’ve always bootstrapped my business. Actually, I got an investor twice, but usually I bootstrap my businesses. And for me, I know what that feels like, right? I understand those struggles as a business owner of, like, “Man, I’m really nervous about this or nervous about that.” And so we always think about that when working with people. It’s like, “Hey, listen, even if they’re a big company, you have to respect people and their time.”

And once again, I think trust—you touched on trust earlier, which I think is a big one—you really have to build that up. It’s important, especially these days. You gotta treat people right. You know, it’s just important—not just because of the money, but because being good pays off.

Yeah, I think that’s the thing. It’s so funny because I remember when I started writing and started putting out some of the stuff we were doing, and people were like, “Why would you do that? Why would you tell everybody your secrets?” And I’m like, “Why would I not?” I look at it differently—like, I’m literally telling people everything. Whatever you ask me—”Shane, how are you making money?”—I would tell you exactly what I’m doing. I’d give you the equation, I’d send you a PDF on how to do it. I just think there’s business for everybody. I don’t really have competitors, because I don’t look at people as competitors; I look more at the collaboration side of things, right? Like partnerships—what can we do to help each other out?

I think when I started doing that, when I started writing that content, I saw it as a gift. People were asking me, “How do I start doing this influencer thing? Do I have to hire an agency?” And I’d say, “I write about it all the time. I literally have hundreds of articles where you can at least get enough information to be dangerous—a good foundation—before you jump into this thing and go pay somebody a lot of money.” I don’t know. There’s just so much information out there, and I think that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is, you can really find anything—there’s probably a course on how to build purple elephants in your backyard. Not sure if it’s making a lot of money, but it’s there.

Yeah, it is, and it’s, you know, as we talk about that, it’s almost like—and this is another thing from that interview I did last week—about, you know, they said, “Hey, when you were younger, it was one thing: the networking. But it was also looking for a mentor or finding somebody to follow,” right? And I think that was something, and that’s kind of what you’re touching on. It’s like, if you have somebody and you’re like, they put out great content, they’re putting together an eBook and stuff for you that literally could be, obviously, hundreds of hours—could be thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars—that they put into this to be successful, to figure out the winning equations, and you can just take that. Like, that’s crazy if you really think about it.

I mean, because back in the day, it was like, “Hey, if I’m successful, you know, I’ve got to kind of hold it close to my chest. I can’t tell anybody because somebody might steal my ideas.” And now it’s like, “Hey, this worked.” Like, the value in that—of, like, these groups, or whatever it is—one of the master groups, or whatever they have, like mastermind groups—yeah, mastermind groups. I mean, that’s, to me, awesome. Except I belong to, like, 30 of them, and it’s hard. It’s hard to keep up with all of them. But other than that—other than the fact that I, you know, I do chip in every once in a while—I think it’s just awesome.

The amount of content out there is—and what’s gonna, I think you touched on it—it’s like, if you can find that person that you really enjoy, follow them. There’s no reason not to. They’re gonna give you their best stuff.

So, and I will tell the audience that if you unsubscribe from me, I will follow you, I will find you. So, just so don’t ever unsubscribe. I’m kidding, totally kidding.

It’s creepy when you go and knock on their door. I quit doing that because it was taking up so much time. You’ve got to drive to their house and then you find out where their kids go to school to, you know, and then you’ve got to build this research—it just gets weird and super awkward. But we’re not doing that anymore, so we’re good.

It’s—yeah, that’s how I became an influencer. I was like, “You’re going to follow me, or I’m going to follow you. How about that? How about that for a threat?” Right?

So, back in the day, I remember thinking, “The more subscribers you have, the better,” right? I had a client who had well over 100,000 email subscribers, and we were like, “Oh my God, this is the best thing since sliced bread.” But what I didn’t realize was that you have to segment that list. You can’t just say, “Yep, send out 100,000 emails,” especially at the beginning when I was doing this. It’s just one of those deals where it’s crazy—it’s almost an issue if you have that many.

I think it’s better to have a smaller, more intimate list. I always tell people, “Hey, if you want to get off my list, that’s totally cool.” To me, there’s no point in forcing a relationship. It just doesn’t make sense. I used to add folks on LinkedIn with a little note—kind of the same thing you did. But for me, unless it’s someone I really need to keep in contact with, I’m like, “Okay, it’s no problem.”

If it’s somebody I really want to keep in touch with, I might wonder, “Hey, why don’t you want to be with me? I thought we were friends and stuff. I thought we were gonna have a family together. Now here you are, unsubscribing…you bastard.”

Yeah, I mean, go and then go find somebody you like better. You’ve already touched on that—why not?

So, in your opinion, what do you think are the biggest challenges in content marketing? Because you guys are obviously doing heavy content—I see you everywhere. But what do you think the challenges are these days, both for your company and maybe for a new company coming in? What do you see?

So here’s the deal—it’s funny. I don’t know if you know, but I teach a class at UCLA, and one of the things is influencer marketing and how to be an influencer, like a personal branding type course. The reason I’m telling you that is because one of the things I show my students is my very first blog post, and it was literally terrible. I didn’t write it in crayon, but I felt like I did. I was sipping on a juice cup— it was just bad. It was really bad.

But I have that on my blog, and I let them read it. They go, “God, that’s terrible,” and I say, “Exactly—but I started,” right? You gotta start somewhere. Now the content I put out is different because I have a team. But back then, like you said about going to the gym, you have to commit yourself. And it doesn’t need to be epic. I think people get caught up in thinking, “Oh, I read this… oh my God, it has to be as good as that.” No—just get started, right? Get out there and produce something. It’s gonna improve.

Any big YouTuber’s first video was crap. I haven’t even seen it, and I can tell you that. It’s just one of those things. We get a lot of internal stuff—nerves about putting ourselves out there. But hey, you just have to do it. The quality will come over time, but you’ve gotta start building that.

Yeah, I think that’s important. I think turning off the notifications is probably key, right? And grinding it out. I mean, that’s how things don’t get finished, right? When I have 15,000 tabs open and I’m 10% into everything, then at the end of the day, I don’t really feel like I did a ton. Probably more than most people, but I still feel like I’m a little… I don’t know, I just didn’t get to the finish line on anything, which is never a fun thing.

So I did want to touch on the email thing real quick. I’ll just give you my two cents on this. I actually hired a personal assistant—kind of an executive VA—to take on my emails, which was a scary step. In fact, let me give a shout-out to Ian, because that’s the guy I hired, and he’s doing an awesome job.

It was a huge step for me because I was getting bogged down with emails. You know, the more content we write, the more stuff gets out there, and then there’s more people inquiring, more people asking. So he’s been working with me—I’ve been working with him almost an hour, hour and a half a day for about two months, and we’ve got a good little cadence going. I just figure out what stuff I have to answer and what stuff he can answer as me, then make sure he facilitates it, because a lot of it’s just busy work.

I look at it like this: I can’t have somebody go and speak on stage for me, right? I can’t have someone come on a podcast interview as me. Maybe we’ll be able to clone me over time, but not right now—we haven’t figured that out yet. My wife’s like, “I do not want two of you,” and I’m like, “Okay.” But anyway, we’ll figure that out. Those are small details.

That’s what I had to look at: what do I have to do, and what can be delegated? When I was younger, like I said, I wasn’t a huge delegator. I’d think, “Oh, I can take this on,” and work 20 hours a day. It didn’t usually end too well for me, because I was young and thought I could take on anything. Then the delegation thing happened, and I was always nervous about whether they’d do as good a job as I would. Now we have processes in place, so it’s better.

Anyway, literally two months ago, I had somebody take on my emails, and like I said, it’s been a lot of training. Obviously, I’ve been doing a lot of that. How many hours a week does it save me? I’d say right now, it’s probably saving me at least three or four hours, maybe more. He’s probably about 70% there at this point, because we’re still putting templates together on how I answer some emails.

Really, my goal with this whole thing—something we just started—is that in the mornings, when I wake up at 5:30 or so, drinking my coffee, he’ll have a Google Doc with exactly all my interviews, who I’m interviewing, who’s interviewing me, where I need to be, my flight—everything is right there. For example, if we’re sending you some questions for the podcast, there’s a link to that. Everything is in one place. I want him to go through my emails and weed out the stuff I don’t need to see. I should probably unsubscribe from some of it, but right now we’re just sorting it into folders, and then we’ll delete what we don’t need.

I felt bad for the guy because jumping into my email is like—I’ve never fought a wild bear, but I’m assuming there are some parallels. Maybe you have a little blood on you and the bear comes up really hungry. That might have been easier than dealing with my inbox. Once again, shout-out to Ian—my buddy Ian—who’s probably in my emails right now, answering them while I’m on this podcast. God bless America.

So yeah, it was a huge step for me, and it’s a lot of trust, too. You know, I’ve got invoices going through there and all kinds of stuff. It’s the whole shebang. But I got really lucky. I did a lot of interviews for the position. And yeah, you can’t go wrong. As you said, those emails of mine are getting answered, and my hands are right here, so once…

I’m telling you, it’s the training thing. So I’ll tell you what the key for me is—and the way that we do it—I do video trainings with him on Zoom, we record them, and then what I do is download the recording and send it to him. He then takes notes on what we talked about—the high-level stuff—and puts it in a Google Drive doc so it’s searchable.

So there we go. We have a copy of the recording—video and audio. I put it in Dropbox so we have it, he takes some notes on it so it’s searchable, and then if he has any other questions, we can address those. It’s this continuous training. We probably have 60 videos now on “How do you answer this?” or “What’s going on here?” or “How do you…?”

He’s also helping with sales because I’m—I’m not saying this to brag—but I’m the only salesperson for my company. I have a 31-person team, so there’s a bit of responsibility there, right? I’ve got to keep the kids fed. I didn’t even know that was a thing, but apparently you do have to feed them.

So now, I’m the only salesperson. When leads come in, we have processes, but we’re filtering through those. Now he knows how to answer them and get them to a point where it warrants me spending some time—because they’re a potential serious client, not just somebody who has a dream and an idea. I’ll still help that person out, but the serious client is somebody who’s actually got something in place and is ready, with some sales coming in. Then we can take them to that next level.

Yeah, no, I definitely—well, if I’ve written my book, then you’re gonna have to, I mean, you know, it gets weird. I’ll come to your house. I already told you I’ve done some really weird stuff in the past. Probably I shouldn’t have admitted that while recording, but anyway, buddies, we’re gonna do it. That’s it.

If you see me at your door, you’re gonna be like, “Damn it, I need to get a VA—he’s here,” but I’ll ask you about your book, and then we’ll both be fine, because we know he hasn’t written his book yet.

Awesome. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast, bud. I’m sure we’ll be in touch here real soon.

Sounds like a plan, brother, man, we’ll talk soon.