The Best of Content Marketing With Jeff Bullas

I’m from Australia, so I speak with a strange accent. For some people around the world, it’s an Aussie accent with a touch of English, I suppose, because I was raised in a little city called Adelaide, which wasn’t settled by convicts, whereas Sydney was, which is where I now live. So, I grew up in Adelaide, and then I had the fun stuff. My dad had a ski boat, so we had a lot of fun growing up as teenagers. I did my high school there, and then I got a teaching degree just near Sydney in New South Wales, which is, I suppose, the most populous state in Australia. After I finished my teaching degree, I went and started teaching, but I quickly discovered something I really didn’t enjoy. After five or six years of doing something I hated, waking up and going every day, yeah, the kids were great, but it just wasn’t me. So, I did a bit of career testing, I suppose. We tried three different jobs over my summer break from teaching, and I discovered I did a bit of real estate selling, a little insurance selling, and then got into the tech industry. I worked with a mate who was starting up a tech startup, and I went, “Wow, this feels really exciting.” That’s how I got into tech. It was a bit of a convoluted path, and I haven’t really left the technology industry for very long over the last 30 years. My first introduction to tech trends was during the PC revolution, with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the IBM PC, and the Mac. It was pretty exciting times. So I thought, “Wow, this is so much fun!” Then, in the mid-1990s, I started a communications business doing structured cabling for comms. Tech again, but I noticed the internet and web emerging in the mid-1990s, really turning to public consciousness. The internet had started earlier, but it gained real momentum with the browser and Netscape back then. I went, “Wow, this is fascinating! I can get information anywhere, anytime!” I started a consulting business around that. That was the next big trend point for me that I saw would transform business and life. You didn’t have to go to the library anymore to get your information. Disruptive, for sure. But the thing that really got me was around 2008 when I saw people using social media. I noticed people’s behavior was very obsessive back then, and still is today. I saw that and thought, “This is a powerful medium. I could put my content out there without begging the gatekeepers, the media moguls, or paying for it.” So, in 2009, after observing that and reading a few books, Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek opened up the idea of digital business to me. I found it very attractive after working in the corporate world, where you show up nine to five and everything is structured. I had a big streak of independence, so I decided to read David Meerman Scott’s book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I got to know David, and I liked the idea of branding content that would attract an audience to you. I was used to building businesses by cold calling, knocking on doors, fax broadcasting, and lead gen using old and new tech. So the idea of inbound marketing really intrigued me. Then, there was one little nudge to start the blog. I read a blog post by HubSpot that said, “If you have an inkling of what you want to write about or start a business around, just start a blog.” So, in March 2009, just over 10 years ago, I started jeffbullas.com. That’s the path to what we’re doing today. I became an online publisher and started creating content. I was just fascinated by this new media that people were obsessing over, and I thought, “Where there’s obsession, there’s power.” What I also loved about it was the intersection of humanity and technology. Social media made it easy to use tech, and the other addition, which created the perfect storm that has transformed businesses all around the world and how we live and consume content, was the addition of the smartphone. As Steve Jobs made it popular, social media combined with a smartphone gave us a publishing machine in our pocket. That was the perfect storm, and it’s rippling through business and life. As we move into AI and machine learning, getting the boring stuff done by machines over the next 40-50 years, it’s just another brave human social experiment. It’s fascinating.

Yeah, you’ve got to play the long game. And that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. If they don’t get traffic after two or three blog posts, they’re like, “Well, this is a waste of time.” But it’s the long game you’ve got to play. It’s persistence. I love the quote by Bill Gates where he says, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year, but underestimate what they can do in 10 years.” Yeah, the reality is, especially as you build domain authority with search engines, create more content, and more sites link to you. The reality is that it takes time to build that up. Like these snake oil merchants saying, “Well, I can get you on page one in one week or two weeks,” and you’re going, “Okay, good luck with that.” Yeah. So the reality is, it is a long game, but once you’ve built that authority over time, things get a lot easier.

Yeah, it’s, I think the essence is timing is everything in business, right? Well, not everything, but it’s a majority. I think I saw a TED Talk presentation—can’t remember his name—but they studied 200 companies, and the number one difference for success wasn’t how much money they had or their connections. It was basically what their timing was like in the market. It was a 45% factor, as opposed to the other four factors, which were in the 20s and 30s and less. So timing can be really, really important. And once, if you don’t get a jump on that, and that’s why, for me, keeping an eye on emerging trends is really, really important. Just seeing it doesn’t mean you have to chase every shiny new toy. I think that’s something we can all get trapped into, especially with the shiny new toys of social media. There’s some interesting new social networks that have started, one based out of China, which has its own implications for security, both for everyone in the Western world. But it’s an app called TikTok, which started in 2016 and already has 500 million plus users.

Yeah, have a look at the demographic. So it’s full of teenagers doing lip-syncing and pranking. So in essence, it’s pretty superficial, but it can be addictive. And I can see that, even not being a teenager, I can see how addictive it could be and is. So that’s fascinating. I’d heard of TikTok before, but basically, it’s very much about the power of video, which we all know is important. But on the board of a startup, eight years into a startup called Shuttle Rock, and we do Facebook video ads, so for us to keep an eye on what’s happening in the Facebook video space is really, really important.

Yeah, I taught high school. So, in my last year of teaching, I was teaching senior school economics, which wasn’t a subject that excited me. So, I suppose that contributed to my decision. The other thing I struggled with as a school teacher was feeling like I was teaching a lot of things that weren’t necessary to life. The system imposes on schools what they should be teaching. Yes, you’ve got to learn the basics—you’ve got to do math, learn to write, learn to read. But I think some of the life skills that are really important, which as parents we should be teaching a course on, aren’t often covered. The reality is that schools should be part of that whole learning ecosystem to help build life skills. And I’ve just really felt, and still do, that that’s often not covered in the curriculum.

Yeah, and we’re still learning how to use online education as well. The roll-out of that, people can learn so easily by just YouTubing, you know, just—Yeah, COVID and YouTube, yeah. “How do I do this? How do I do that? How do I learn to play guitar?” All of that. But the thing is, when you’re talking about teaching and education, dealing with a system that’s been around for, what are we talking, 100-plus, 150 years, the reality is that change is going to take generations, right? So despite the promise of online education, we’re still all social creatures. So, the new premium is going to be human contact. I’m fascinated to see what happens going forward over the next few decades.

Yep, exactly. And it’s, it is a huge social experiment in terms of watching kids, you know, want to be Insta-famous and think they can make money out of it. And for me, that is a little concerning, that they think they can have it by being beautiful or doing beauty products or, you know, having a fabulous body or whatever—the whole Insta-famous, Kim Kardashian-type content, which I just am not interested in. That younger generation is certainly in that space, and some people are going to do very well out of that. But the reality is, yeah, it’s very superficial. And how that impacts people’s thinking about life can be, it’s got me quite concerned. So, social media is both, you know, cuts two ways. I think it can lead to superficial wanting of attention, but it can also create distribution that’s great to change the world.

Yeah, we just did some speaking. I’m in Estonia in about a month’s time, speaking over there at a digital leap conference. That’s going to be fun. We’re going to Chicago in October and a bunch of other things around that. So, I suppose, for me, as we continue to evolve both as a business, we’re starting to get more involved in startups and software as a service companies. I’ve been on the board of a startup called Shuttle Rock. We’ve pivoted twice, and now we’re a global Facebook media partner. What we do is scale videos or static images into videos, and we can do that at scale very cost-effectively. That’s great for Facebook because it helps create content for them that actually optimizes their Facebook ads. We can increase conversion rates significantly by 10, 20, 40, even 50% over standard ads. So, we’re moving more into strategic startup investment and sweat equity space. That’s where we’re starting to focus more. When I started the blog, it was about what social media is for me, but now, it’s more about what social media does—it enables you to have a voice, to reach the world, to change the world, and to create a business. So that’s what I’m moving more into. I’ll also be doing a little bit of traveling. But I totally agree with you about routine. Like the influencer life that’s maybe touted around as being this romantic vision of hotels, beaches, bikinis, and fabulous food? For me, sometimes just boring, day-to-day routine and normalcy is the comfort, interspersed with interesting, fun stuff. Life is actually more about contrast, not just about being stuck in a routine or always being on the road. I think a lot of people, including speakers and friends of mine, have realized that being on the road all the time is just tiring. It’s harder to stay fit because you break your routine. It’s hard to eat the right food because you’re in different countries, and you need to get the important deep work done, like in Cal Newport’s book, “Deep Work.” That really summed up what I’ve been doing for the last 7-8 years. I think it’s really important. To segue a little back into the influencer space, a lot of stuff created is what I call superficial. It’s about consumerism at its worst, rather than creating something that changes people’s lives significantly for the better. Cal Newport talks about how, when you sit down every day and actually spend maybe two hours a day writing, painting, doing video, or creating content of consequence, that’s where the magic happens. The internet and the social web have given us the platform to share our creations with the world. For me, it’s really important because creating is one thing, but where the real magic happens is when you share your creation with the world. Whether you’re sharing your business as it grows, sharing your art, it’s really when you start sharing it with the world through this global media we have now—the social web—that’s when you start changing the world, and the world is changing you. And I think it’s important to understand that and think about, “Why do I want to be an influencer?” If you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, it’s not going to be sustainable. It’s got to come from a passionate interest in something. I’m just reading Richard Branson’s book at the moment—he wrote it in 2007—and he just does stuff he loves doing. He’s driven by a passionate interest in the subject area that he wants to get into. That’s the only way it’s going to be sustainable. If you’re doing it just for money, it’s going to get to you. But if you’re doing it for the right reasons, I think it’s much more sustainable. The thing is, as you grow what you’re passionate about, it’s also going to evolve. And that leads to pivot points and transitions. You really have to listen to what you’re doing and get in touch with that. For me, the social web has totally changed my life by giving me a voice and helping me realize how important it is to share my writing and my creations. A lot of people are afraid to do that. They’re afraid of being judged or asking, “Why would anyone care?” They see others who are much better than them, so they feel they need to get it just right before they hit publish or share. The reality is much different. You should be sharing your best work, and when you start off, it might not be perfect, but it shouldn’t stop you. For me, it wasn’t just the writing on the blog—it was the global interaction. As people impacted the content we created, they gave us feedback. That’s the magic—creating content, whether it’s video, images, writing, or art, and sharing it. You get feedback, and you know what works and what doesn’t. You create relationships from that, and I love that. For me, I’ve met so many wonderful people globally. I remember talking to a lady a few years ago who had just started with social media. She was at Social Media Examiner’s event, Social Media Marketing World, and she said, “I feel like I’ve just joined my tribe.” She had a passionate interest in social media and met others who shared that passion. That’s what I think is a really important facet of the social web—it’s social, and it connects disparate tribes all around the world. I’m continually amazed by people I’ve only met online or who have read my blog, and I go to events or travel across the world and bump into them. They tell me, “You changed my life. You awakened a passion in me.” I just continue to be amazed by both the opportunity of creating and sharing and distributing with the world. For me, it’s just been awesome, to say the least.

And a lot of them just do not realize that building distribution is just work over years. Kim Kardashian basically built distribution by appearing on mass media, which was a lucky break, and then she used mass media to leverage into the social media space as it emerged. The reality is, it does take a long time, and yes, you will have some lucky breaks along the way, whether it’s an interview on a major show or someone distributing your content on their list. But then, you’ve got to keep an eye on the trends, because what you’re working on may stop working. You only have to look at what happened in Facebook in 2014 as they moved from organic to pay-to-play. The only way you can really get any traction on Facebook these days—unless you’re a movie star—is to pay for it, and then you’ve got to be really smart about how you spend the money. The reality is, social media before 2013 was fabulously organic for three or four years. But as the landscape changed, with pay-to-play and algorithms modifying, everyone’s organic traffic disappeared. There were businesses that built their models on organic social, and it almost disappeared overnight. So the thing for me is, it’s definitely multi-channel. Over the last 12 months or two years, we focused a lot on building domain authority because there are two parts to getting, you know, Google authority. To rank on the first page—or if you’re lucky or worked hard enough—number one on page one, we decided, as we saw social decline, we needed to make sure we were covering ourselves from a distribution point of view. We invested about six to nine months of work into the technical aspect of SEO for the website, the structure, pillar content—creating 5,000-6,000-word blog posts as pillar content to create authority and establish ourselves as being one of the best in the business in our sector. But it took us, you know, essentially nine months before we started seeing any significant uptick in traffic, and then it dropped away a bit as Google changed their algorithm. We invested a lot of time and money, and even with the domain authority we have, with about 5-6 million visitors a year, it still took us that long to see an uptick. The other thing changing is the effectiveness of email. Email open rates are continuing to decline, so about 12 months ago, we invested in building our Facebook Messenger subscriber base. Today, we’ve got about 12,000 on that list, but we have much better open rates and click-through rates there. But then you’re not sure, because Facebook might change the whole strategy on the use of Facebook Messenger. They might say, “We’re going to split business and personal messaging,” so you’re going to have to start again. Who knows? But there are rumors about that happening, and you just have to understand that you’ve got to make hay while the sun shines because the algorithm might change tomorrow.

New Zealand’s quite good as well. I have heard, yeah, a lot of Americans live in New Zealand, yeah, getting bomb bunkers built. I think so.

Yeah, and it worries me a lot when I see people just building personal branding on just Instagram, and I’m going, “Gee, that is such a dangerous place to do that.” Instagram should be one of your digital assets that you have investment in, but you do not own it. It’s rental property you have there. You are there under the landlord’s authority and permission, and they can decide they’re going to sell the house, or they’re going to change it, or blow it up, or, you know, government regulation comes in and changes it again, which is a potential. Actually, it’s nipping at the toes of Facebook and others. Facebook even said they’re going to combine all their messengers from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, into one app, and then the EU guys have to be very careful about doing that because it’ll be seen as a monopoly. So, we’re watching social media grow up. It was the wild west 10 years ago, and now it’s going to be subject to all the rigor of mature industries as it continues to evolve. For me, it’s something I’ve been banging on about for nearly a decade, is about owning your asset. Yeah, sure, use social media as your distribution; it’s a hub and spoke model. You’ve got your home, your website, your blog, and as you just said, it’s yours. As long as you keep paying that hosting fee and renewing your domain name, yeah. So, the reality is, you need to make sure you do that. So when I see people wanting to be Insta-famous and that’s the only asset, I’m going, “Scary. You really need to rethink this because you’re playing on borrowed ground.”

I did it very ad hoc initially. So I just, I suppose I created SEO authority just with blunt force trauma; we just created a lot of content. In fact, for four years, shortly after I started, I got up at 4:30 am before I started my day job, and by 9 am, I’d basically written a blog post, published it, distributed it on email, and sent it out on social. We created authority just by doing that. But we discovered two years ago that as Google’s become much more technical, and as the algorithms have become more sophisticated, we’ve had to really double down on the technical side. So we’ll go in and look at doing some keyword research, seeing what categories and what phrases are getting the right traffic. You don’t want to be chasing just one-word phrases. You need to go after long-tail phrases, four to five words is a good length. Questions are actually big now, as Google’s algorithms evolve. What doesn’t seem as important anymore, but things like making sure the site loads quickly, yeah, making sure that when people go to your mobile site, it’s easy to read, are also crucial. Also, the calls to action to convert those readers into subscribers and then into customers need to be done well. It’s a very complicated space, as you know, but that’s why just doing something every day is a step towards building a sustainable business, an online business, and being aware of changes that are going to happen around you. So we really doubled down on the technical side—site loading speed, making sure we had a site map done, making sure we had the categories that are important in our industry, and someone who doesn’t really understand SEO. Look, I’m not an SEO expert. I understand the concepts, but I basically built the team. One of my core team members is really, really good at SEO, so it’s important that early on, I think you get your site structure and technical setup right, and then your categories, and then the key phrases you want to chase under that. And you can’t control all of that. All you can do is make sure you get 80% right. The next job, after getting it technically well, and you should be doing it in parallel, is creating content that solves people’s problems and positions you as an expert in your space. And then continue to do that creation.

You started. That’s the most important thing. And for me, one of the key phrases I use all the time is, “Done is better than perfect.” So you’ve just got to get started. And yeah, some of us are more conservative than others, some of us are much more introverted. I think Brene Brown covers that, you know, in her TED Talk. The reality is about 40% of the population is introverted, so they’re much more afraid of actually putting themselves out there, but it’s a fear you’re going to have to overcome in the online world because you’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there and start, and be willing to be judged. And, you know, when I started writing, I just needed to get it out, so I maybe hadn’t proofread it, you know, correctly, or had the grammar that was a little bit average, and I’d have the grammar police and the spelling police turn up and give me a hard time. I went, Well, okay, sorry, I didn’t have time for an editor. Because if that sometimes doesn’t work that way, yeah? And especially when I don’t have big bucks to invest in a team of people before even making money—that’s not going to happen. So you just got to suck it up. And I think you get a little thicker skin over time to handle that sort of heat. Yeah? And at the end of that, I went, Well, yeah, I got more traffic than you. So yes, you can complain about my grammar. You can complain about my spelling, but I’ve got more attention than you have. And actually, I’ve got a business, and we actually have a lot of fun doing this stuff. So thanks for the input, nice website. Thanks for letting us know, and we’ll make changes. We’ll get around to making changes. Thank you.

One tool I discovered early on is Snagit, which lets me capture screenshots and edit images. That was important early on. Another tool I rely on is my CRM, Infusionsoft (often called Confusionsoft because it’s technical). A good email or CRM marketing platform for automation is essential. Early on, I got a hard time for automating social media posts on Twitter. The tool I use now for that is Agora Pulse, built by Emerick from Paris. We worked together to build a feature on his platform that allows me to tweet every 15 minutes to my 580,000 Twitter followers. We have a content bank, so I can share content for six days straight without repeating. We refresh the content by retiring older posts and adding new evergreen ones. Agora Pulse is a tool I can’t do without. The latest tool we couldn’t do without is ManyChat, a Facebook bot platform. We started using it to build our Facebook Messenger subscriber base as email open rates have been declining. ManyChat has been invaluable in the last 12 months, highlighting how the landscape continues to change.

Christ, yeah, yeah. I think I met him in San Diego a couple years ago. So, but yeah, the whole Facebook Messenger side is certainly something we’re doubling down on. And we can get, you know, the same we can get more clicks and more conversions from Facebook Messenger, and the list is only is 1/5 1/7 the size of the email list. So, yeah. So we certainly have doubled down on that. We’ve, we’ve invested, been over 12 months worth in that at the moment, and we’re gonna do some more testing as we evolve that out.

The last four months have been a bit of a tough time personally. I won’t get into detail, but I’ve had to step back a bit. But I’ve got a book in the middle. So which is more about what’s made me happy and what I found to be what helps me to be resilient, what helps me to persist? More about life skills, and necessarily, about social media, digital marketing. I’m really more fascinated about the human condition, I suppose, in terms of how we make life that success, and how we communicate effectively online. And so that’s the book’s more on that sort of space and but we’re going to also working more strategically with startups, not first stage startups, necessarily, but ones are starting to get some traction and maybe help them with some sweat equity. So we’ll just work on some of that sort of sort of ideas, because we’ve got a platform to help people, you know, grow their base, grow their subscribers, and we know how to do that as well. So yeah, more that, I suppose, just keeping it fun. And for me, it’s like Richard Branson said, if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing. And I think it doesn’t mean you don’t do some of the stuff that needs to be done, such as, you know, make sure you you got your account, looking after your taxes, and all the basic, boring stuff. Yeah, really, we’re transitioning to, I suppose, a space within the space we started with social media and digital entrepreneurship and so working closer with startup strategically, Software as a Service, companies where we can help them scale through our distribution. Yeah, there’s some interesting stuff that we’re working on.

Yeah, I do a lot of cycling. I used to be a runner for decades, but my feet started to wear out from the impact. So cycling is great because it’s a very low-impact exercise. You can ride with friends, have a chat, have a coffee, and at the same time, you’re seeing beautiful landscapes unfold around you. We’ve ridden in places like South Africa. We’ve done the Argus, which is the biggest road bike race in the world, where they close down the whole Cape. You ride from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. That had 40,000 people. I’ve ridden in New Zealand several times. We rode in France, in the French Alps, around the French tour earlier last year. For me, it’s about making people try to separate life and business, and I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. It is life. So how can you make business fun? How can you make life fun? How can you make life fun while making a difference? We’re about to speak in Estonia, and we’re going to take the opportunity while we’re there to spend a couple of months in the lakeside city of Italy and do some cycling, but also get into a daily routine of work as well. So, it’s basically my life continues to be an experiment in life design, because it’s something I’m really passionate about. I think seeing people line up to get into the lifts and go into the high-rise towers, then all pour out at five o’clock in the afternoon is something that distinctly demotivates me. Luckily, I’m in a position where I don’t have to do that. Yeah, for me, it’s about—and we also intend to spend some time in Bali for a few weeks as well—and work from there, but working in places where we can create a routine, not just travel, but explore the world while having fun, growing the business, and doing it through a routine, and getting fit along the way with some cycling.

It isn’t a bad thing. I’ve been to some fabulous places—Turkey, Beirut, Kuwait, Romania, Norway, Helsinki, and so on. My mom actually asked me the other day, “How many places have you been to?” I thought, “Good question, Mom.” So I started naming them off, and I think I got up to 30 without too much trouble. I just feel like I’m a lucky guy, and I’m so grateful to have, in essence, heard the whisper to start the blog. That’s the thing about your passionate purpose. I think Steven Spielberg has a lovely YouTube video where he talks about listening for that whisper because it doesn’t shout. I think that’s really important for people to understand. Intuition and what you’re meant to be doing isn’t always obvious. We were brought up in a world decades ago where you had to be a nurse, teacher, doctor, or lawyer, or a cabinet maker—those traditional roles. But now, the career and life design space has so many awesome opportunities, and you have so much flexibility to reach the world and create a life around that. That’s what happened to me, and I never cease to be grateful, nor surprised, by the opportunities that show up because I was willing to share my creation with the world.

Beyond traveling experiences and the ability to meet people globally, whether it’s at conferences or elsewhere, for me, it’s not about more stuff. It’s about more meaningful experiences that make life rich. Studies show that earning more than $75,000 to $100,000 doesn’t make you any happier, as long as you have the basics covered—food on the table, debts paid off, and no one chasing you for money. The rest comes down to quality human relationships and experiences that feed your soul. That’s what I’d spend on—experiences that allow me to connect with more people and discover new opportunities, which enables me to have more fun with more people. That’s what I do.

Absolutely, I think our purpose in life is discover what our purpose in life is. And I think it’s really, keep looking, keep listening, and it will be a whisper.

So we got a contact form at Jeffbullas.com, so jeffbullas.com, so we’re not hard to find. So drop in, check us out and happy to have a chat and we read all sorts of fun stuff.

Great to be part of the show.

Goodbye.