Amanda Milligan Discusses Earned Syndication

[00:07] Matt Hepburn: This is a call to all current and aspiring entrepreneurs. How you market your business can be the difference between whether or not you succeed online. But don't worry, we're here to help you with current strategies, tips, and tricks that you can apply to your business or business idea. This is The EMJ Podcast. with your host, Matt Hepburn. This is episode eight of The EMJ Podcast and I am your host, Matt Hepburn. Today we're joined by Amanda Milligan, the head of marketing at stacker.com, and she's going to be talking to us about earn syndication and how this form of marketing can increase the organic traffic to your website to individual posts and increase the domain authority to the overall site. I highly suggest listening to this. This is going to be fascinating. Hey Amanda, welcome to the show.

[01:03] Amanda Milligan: Thank you so much for having me mad. I'm excited to be here.

[01:06] Matt Hepburn: Absolutely. Anytime you want to come on the show, we'd love to have you on.

[01:10] Amanda Milligan: Awesome.

[01:10] Matt Hepburn: So, I was hoping to tell the listeners a little bit about what you do at Stacker and what Stacker is, just to give it a little context.

[01:20] Amanda Milligan: Sure, yes. So, in general, Stacker and that's Stackermedia.com, if you want to see what the entire company does, is we're a media company that is essentially a newsroom and a newswire. So, kind of like the Associated Press or Reuters, we distribute content to more than 3000 publications across North America. We're different though because we give the stories away for free. So, a lot of the publishers pay to subscribe to things like Associated Press, but we give our stories away for free because we're trying to empower publishers around the world. But the context of this conversation I work on the Stacker Studio part of the business, which is our brand partnership arm. So, we work with brands, we create content on their behalf, and we syndicate it through the same newswire as we do all of our other content. This is one of our main revenue streams to allow us to create so much free content for publishers. So, it's a really cool model. It's very new. There's not really a lot of other people who do what we do, which makes my job interesting as head of marketing because I have to tell this new story of how we're not standard syndication, we're not the typical like we're not digital PR, but we're kind of similar to a lot of these things. So, it's a lot of fun.

[02:36] Matt Hepburn: Absolutely. And having worked in the enterprise space for seven plus years now, the typical syndication that I see is a business will syndicate their content on other channels that they own and that's the typical syndication process. But you guys are doing something completely different. You put out an article, I believe, on Maas that caught my eye and once I read through this, I'm like I said, this is absolutely amazing. Could you talk a little bit about the difference between paid syndication and urban syndication, and really just the syndication where you talked about the normal syndication that brands do. What makes this so different?

[03:20] Amanda Milligan: Yeah, that's a great point. That's part of the fun of my job, because you're exactly right that syndication as a word has so many different meanings to different people depending on how they've used it, like the different types. So, there's like owned syndication is what I call it, which is essentially, yeah, I syndicate this through channels I have control over, or even if you're just republishing something on LinkedIn or on Medium or through your own channels, that is still a form of syndication. Right? There's also paid syndication where you're paying an external partner to distribute something that you provide to them. So, I think some common versions of that are like distributing press releases, right? Or a lot of different companies will distribute it to their audience for lead generation purposes. And it's usually like a case study or something that's paid syndication. And then we do what I call earned syndication, which is that nothing that we're doing is paid for, so it's not sponsored. And for the SEO out there, it's not no follow links or sponsored links. It's all earned pickups the person's running it because they want to, not because you paid them to, or because you have control over it, which we can dive more into it, but I think it's much more of an authority play than it is necessarily. Like some people who are syndicating really bottom of the funnel content, or they're paying to get a press release out there mostly looking for brand awareness or really bottom of the funnel, like they're just paying for a very specific audience to hear about them. This is an approach that is more about building the authority of your brands, both for your potential audience, your potential clients and customers, but also for Google and your search engine optimization. So, it is an interesting landscape of how many different types of syndication there are. And I don't think people talk about and differentiate them enough.

[05:13] Matt Hepburn: No, and honestly, I've only seen the two before. I've seen the paid part where it's more like on a tech target site or something like that and the one that's owned. So those are the two that I'm familiar with. You've talked about earned syndication, how this approach is better for SEO and authority. I was hoping you could explain a little bit about that.

[05:36] Amanda Milligan: Sure, yeah. So, the way that I tend to think about it is anybody in marketing who works in inbound and search, if you're getting any of your traffic or you're converting people through Google and through organic search, then there's two things you have to care about. You have to care about building authority with your audience. They have to consider you an expert in what you do for them to eventually convert. And you need to consider the authority from Google's perspective so that they'll rank you highly in the first place. So, you need both of these things in order to see long term, sustained, organic success. So, this kind of approach, and people go about this in different ways, this is where a lot of, like, link building comes in because obviously Google and the way they decide to rank things is sort of a black box. They will never know exactly what percentage they use certain criteria to decide if a site is authoritative or not. But one thing that everybody seems to agree upon is that content like what's on your site and the links that are pointing to your site are two major criteria for how Google is deciding how to rank you. So when you're earning content, like content pickups and you're earning links, that is signaling to Google that these publishers think that what you're doing is worthy enough to put on their own sites. Whereas if you're doing a paid approach and it's tagged as sponsored or it's like a no follow, that means that none of that kind of credibility is coming back to your site. The other site is basically saying like, oh, they paid for us to do this, or we don't entirely trust what they're doing, so we're not going to send them, we're not going to vouch for them, essentially. So to do earn syndication is to get a lot more of that search benefit that you cannot get from paid syndication while simultaneously in doing so, you're creating content that's good, that people will trust as well. So it has the dual benefit of somebody seeing that and saying, oh, this is a really interesting report, or this is really helpful or engaging, while also Google is able to see those signals and decide that your brand is authoritative.

[07:53] Matt Hepburn: Yeah, well, I love this idea. This is great, this is kind of new and refreshing and different and could you kind of talk about how this earn syndication has changed the traffic and the authority on Stacker.com?

[08:12] Amanda Milligan: Sure. And I think this is the MOZ post you're referring to. This was an article I did.

[08:18] Matt Hepburn: Yes, I read through that and I went, okay, I think I need to reread that a second time after I finish this.

[08:25] Amanda Milligan: Look.

[08:26] Matt Hepburn: Okay, this is a different approach.

[08:29] Amanda Milligan: Yeah, it is. And we realized it was easier. We have some client case studies on our site, but we realized that Stacker.com, which I mentioned, stackermedia.com is kind of like our enterprise site, which explains our entire company and all the different legs parts of it. Stacker.com is the publication. So, if you go to Stacker.com, you'll see all of our stories and we realize we've never actively promoted these stories. We don't have an email list that goes to Reader, we don't do a lot of that stuff. I think we may have an email list that we send. So, I take that back. But it's like 1% of our time we have not invested heavily in marketing these stories. All of the traffic that we got has happened naturally because of earned syndication that we do for our own stories. So, separate from anything that we do for brands, our newsroom is putting these stories together and sending them to these publications who are then picking them up. And because of the signals that we're getting of these third-party publishers who are choosing again and again to republish our stories, we just grew, I don't want to say accidentally because it was an accident. This model is something that we were really invested in to like a million organic visitors per month, which is wild when you're not. I hadn't even gotten to the company yet. I think by the time we hit that number, I'm the only marketing person. And I had not touched that as something to be marketing. And to see those numbers was like, people would want to know if there's proof at all that this works. All of us were like, well, it must, because our site, on its own organically built this kind of authority simply because we were syndicating all of our stories as part of our baseline business model. So, it was fascinating. I think that's how we didn't start working with brands like that came later when we realized that other people would want to partner with us in order to achieve the same kind of growth that we were seeing in doing it ourselves.

[10:37] Matt Hepburn: Oh, absolutely. Could you explain how earned syndication can generate link authority back to the publisher's domain? And just to show how confused I was on my question, I have how paid syndication no, it's how earned syndication can generate that link authority back to the publisher's domain and generate the traffic.

[11:02] Amanda Milligan: Yeah. So, I can only speak for our version of this because other companies have done this if they really invest in it. Like NerdWallet is the classic example, right, where they really invested in content syndication and saw an insane amount of growth. But you really have to invest. So for us, though, the way that we built our partnerships and the fact that we're giving these stories away for free is that the publishers that we work with, they provide a follow link back whether it's to our brand partners if it's a studio story, so they cite the source, but it's also a canonical, which is kind of an area that hasn't been fully explored yet. You ask SEOs and they kind of have varying opinions. But we have seen tremendous impact from canonicals, which for those who don't know what a canonical is in the code of a link or of these placements, it'll basically say where the original version of that story was. It's for Google to understand if a piece of content is replicated if it's republished who the original source was. So, in this case, if the SFGate republishes something our client did. SFGate's code will say, okay, this client is actually the original author of this piece, and we chose to republish it on a top level. It's like so interesting because it's basically how wouldn't that be an authority signal to say that?

[12:36] Matt Hepburn: Oh, it's absolutely authority signal. So, I usually explain it by saying this is the page that we want to rank. Right? So that's kind of the signal, what it is. So, from the brand whose publishing perspective is they're going to understand they're not really going to rank for this. This is more about the experience on their own website for their users to read it, who come to their site. They're not necessarily going to rank for it. You guys are going to rank for it, but the content is still there and it's relevant to that audience, right? Is that correct? Am I getting that?

[13:12] Amanda Milligan: Yeah that's interesting that you brought this up because we get that question a lot where people they want to rank for that piece of content that we created that and syndicated. But yes, it's not really the objective if you think about a content strategy like each piece of content has a very specific objective or it should. And in this case the way that we see it is we're trying to drive domain authority to your domain, to your site, to your brand. And in this type of syndication, we get the links to the home page of a client site and the canonical back to their story. But it's not to rank it because sometimes the publisher will still show up in rankings. Chronicles aren't perfect but it's mostly to say, oh, this brand is producing content that's good enough for the Chicago Tribune to republish it. So, what's going on with this brand? They must be doing some worthwhile stuff and if your company's authority increases that tends to uplift everything, you're doing rather than focusing on just like one specific page.

[14:11] Matt Hepburn: So I'm going to touch on one thing right there just to clarify for our listeners. So, when we are doing the canonical link, we're doing it to the inner page, the original piece of content. However, so could you explain the home page mentioned that you were just talking about before?

[14:29] Amanda Milligan: So that's just part of our model in particular, which is the link that is included in the story. We'll go back to the client’s homepage most of the time.

[14:41] Matt Hepburn: So the canonical goes to the home page, not to, but the canonical goes to your original piece of content on Stack.com but the do follow link goes back to the home page of the brand site, is that correct?

[14:56] Amanda Milligan: Nearly. I know it's very confusing. The canonical actually goes back to its originally published on our client site. It syndicates through us. But the canonical and the link both point to the client's website. It's just that the canonical is the specific article because like I said, it's to show Google where the original version of the article is, right? The link is to their home page.

[15:17] Matt Hepburn: Okay, but that totally makes sense. So, they're getting brand authority on their home page. It's increasing their brand from that do fall link, and it's increasing the metric from whatever software you're using, href or Mazda or whatever around the brand score because it's getting links back to there. But the Canonical is also probably ranking the content on the post that was published on their site and they're going to get more impressions, clicks and click through rates from that from Google because that's going to also increase the ranking.

[15:52] Amanda Milligan: There it is, isn't it? It's such a unique situation.

[15:57] Matt Hepburn: This is brilliant. And you're doing this for brands, so I love that. Okay, so I'm going to pivot a little bit because that just blew my mind right now that I'm understanding what you're doing. Can you recommend a strategy for brands to start connecting with third party publishers so they can start doing earned syndication? How would they do this? How would they start if they said, this is an amazing strategy, how can I do this? And let's think about a small business who just wants to get more relevance within their local market. Too.

[16:36] Amanda Milligan: Yes, absolutely. There are so many answers to this question based on kind of like where you're at. But if we're talking about a small business, I think if you've never done this type of work before, when we talk about newsworthy content, this could be a whole other conversation. But what I basically mean by that is we're not talking about your product or your service or like your company culture, because let's be honest, no third party is going to run that and not think it's an ad. They're going to want you to pay for it. So, if you want to get syndicated or covered in any sort of way, you're trying to create content that speaks to the greater industry. And it sheds some light on a common problem people have. Or maybe it's like a really interesting data analysis of something that came out, something that's more top of the funnel, a little more tangential to what you do in your day to day.

[17:28] Matt Hepburn: So let me ask you a question and see if that gives the right context. So if somebody had an SEO agency website, right, but they noticed something that was happening different within search engine results that touched the whole SEO industry that might then fall underneath that umbrella, is that correct? And they wrote content around that.

[17:51] Amanda Milligan: Yes, exactly. So, it wouldn't be like, here's our product or here's how our service will solve this problem for you. Look at this industry trend. That's a great example. Industry trend, some new insights, something that you're exactly right is appealing to a wider audience because you're talking about publications. They want a wide audience. They're not trying to or even like if they're a niche publication, they still want as many people as applicable to read their stuff. So, if you have no idea where to begin there, my suggestion is think about where you want to be syndicated. If you're starting out, pick those niche sites that are in your industry that you know are authoritative though, like places where you know that your customers or your clients are reading and how you can drive business. This is kind of a different approach.

[18:39] Matt Hepburn: But when you're in business so an audience tool you could use would be like something like Spark Toro to get insights as to where is that audience going, and then look at those websites that are there and then that would be kind of like where you'd want to focus, is that correct?

[18:56] Amanda Milligan: 100%, yeah. And the thing is, the additional research would be like seeing if they've ever syndicated content. And the way that you can usually tell that is at the top where it would say like originally appeared on blank or that sort of a thing, then you'll know, oh, they do accept syndicated content. So that's kind of an extra step there. Now, again, if you're just starting out, it doesn't have to be fully syndicated. You can do more of like the digital PR type of route, which basically means you would need to present them with a reason to link to you and your piece of content. Right, but that's a whole other topic of conversation. But I think mostly you want to see what publications in your industry when you're just starting out, pick the ones that are the closest the line to you and see what they're publishing, like what kind of content do they like to publish, because that is indicative of what their audience is like and create that. It's much more likely for them to syndicate it if it's something that they already tend to publish. Right.

[19:54] Matt Hepburn: So, it wouldn't hurt to reach out to them and ask them directly to, hey, do you syndicate content for earn syndication?

[20:01] Amanda Milligan: Right, yeah. I think if you already created a piece of content, for example, and you pitched one person and you want to pitch other people.

[20:11] Matt Hepburn: That’s a good question. Can you pitch multiple publishers with one piece of content?

[20:17] Amanda Milligan: Oh, yeah. That's the beauty of this whole model. Now what you can't say is like, this is exclusively for you, and then go and pitch it elsewhere. You have to be upfront about it. Just like, I thought this would be beneficial for your audience and for real reasons, don't phone it in because there's so many people doing all kinds of outreach. If you're like me, I get a million pitches a day for all kinds of things. People want to post stuff on Stacker.com. That's not even how that works. You didn't even bother to look at how does it work, so don't be those people. But if you sincerely reached out, you did your research and you genuinely think you created a piece of content that you're sure their audience would be really interested in? Yeah. You certainly should pitch more than one publication. They're getting the benefit of getting free content and not having to pay a writer to make it. And hopefully they're going to drive traffic to their own sites and engage readers already on their site to promote other content that they have. So in any of these situations, it's supposed to be a mutual benefit. Nobody's going to do you a favor. Right.

[21:24] Matt Hepburn: So to make newsworthy content here, a lot of times it's really like, what differentiates your newsworthy content. Right. Do you have any data that supports it? Do you guys sometimes do surveys and things like that to get supporting data from specific audiences, to really then provide that as extra oomph for the publishers?

[21:49] Amanda Milligan: You certainly can. It is a tried and true method, I would say I'll give a plug for those who have virtually never done this before and really want help without going like full large scale mantis research is a group that does kind of what you're saying, like they'll do surveys or they'll try to put the studies together for you. At Stacker, we haven't done surveys quite yet, but we focus on data. So, to your point, you're basically trying to create, if you can, something new. You're trying to find a new insight that can be found either from data, even data that's existed, but no one's analyzed in an interesting way, or nobody.

[22:35] Matt Hepburn: Has made that connection, right?

[22:36] Amanda Milligan: Yes.

[22:37] Matt Hepburn: That's important. Right.

[22:39] Amanda Milligan: There is so much free government data out there that just sits there and hasn't been applied in different ways.

[22:48] Matt Hepburn: Love it.

[22:48] Amanda Milligan: That could be super interesting. So anything like that, if you have internal data, it could be fascinating to people. It really depends on what sector you're in. If you have enough that makes it specifically significant.

[23:02] Matt Hepburn: Do you also tend to say, okay, here's a national model and here are localized models based upon that data that you get?

[23:08] Amanda Milligan: Yes. You're tapping into what I consider one of the most underutilized strategies in this whole part of the industry, which is and we do this and see wild.

[23:22] Matt Hepburn: Results because then you can get local pickups from different news stations and different publishers that say, hey, this is great, and it's relevant to this local city, right?

[23:31] Amanda Milligan: Yes. Okay. So, without me going out of a huge tangent, my degree was in journalism. I never became a reporter. But one of the things they teach you are the news values, which I always think, like, marketers should just know. You should know the news values because it's applicable in so many different ways, especially if you invest in content marketing. But one of them is proximity, because people care much more about what's happening near them than they do anywhere else. For better, for worse. That's just the human condition.

[23:59] Matt Hepburn: Right.

[24:00] Amanda Milligan: So if you're able to take that was literally a strategy people would use would be called localization, where you would take a national story, like you're saying, and you would localize it, which can mean anything from interviewing people in your own community to taking the data for a specific city and comparing it to the rest of the cities. Like, how does it rank? Where does it fall within your state? And we do this, we have a localization product where we'll run the national version of a story. So, we'll say like, the ten best dates for retirement, like, to retire and have as much money as you can and live a comfortable life. I'm just making this up the top of my head. I don't know if we've done that. So, say we've done the ten best states for retirement based on a data set that we found about this, or multiple data sets. We would run the ten best states version. It would get picked up, let's say 200 times. And then we would tweak the headline and the intros for all ten of those cities and re push it out to those places with a new headline because they know that people are more likely to click on Texas is the number one state for XYZ. Then here the top ten. They'll still click on top ten cities, but they're more likely to click it if they know that their studies on that list. Right, right. That has gotten, in some cases, double the number of pickups that we've gotten just taking that approach. And it's the same data set, it's the same analysis, and you're getting so much more value out of it. Love it. I love it.

[25:33] Matt Hepburn: I actually tripped into that one.

[25:37] Amanda Milligan: I'm glad you brought it up because I get so excited about it. Like, yes, localize everything people need to localize.

[25:44] Matt Hepburn: Absolutely. Let me ask you, so if a company was to start to do this and they dedicated some time and resources to this, is there a time frame? They could start seeing results, what type of would happen first? And I know it's based upon how much they invest in that, but what type of results would they start to see first? Would they start to see some more links coming into their home page? Obviously based upon your links to your home page and canonical links to the page. So, I would assume that they might start seeing some increases in their domain authority around their brand. And I would think that the metrics that they would want to have as a baseline when they're starting to do this as well. Since we publish this, whatever the date, time frame is, what are the average impressions, the clicks and the click through rate that we're getting? What's the average position that we have? Or are we tracking through this and use that as a baseline? And then as they're starting to get more pickups, they should start hopefully seeing more impressions, more clicks and click through rate, which means they're getting more traffic organically to that. They'd also want to have a baseline of what their organic traffic all the traffic sources. Because the question is, is it coming organic or is it more referral traffic? Right, it's probably more referral traffic they're getting through the links.

[27:20] Amanda Milligan: Great question.

[27:21] Matt Hepburn: Not sure, but great question. Be interested about the source.

[27:25] Amanda Milligan: Yes. So, this is the way that we typically approach it. And it won't necessarily apply to every approach to this. Right. Like I said, if you're just starting out and you're going for really niche publications, you'll probably see more referral traffic click through like conversions than you would with our approach, which is more like holistic. So the way we do it is yes, we start with the links and.

[27:49] Matt Hepburn: The pickups first because I didn't say that. How many a baseline of how many referring to mains and backlinks you have as well.

[27:56] Amanda Milligan: Yes, so that's where we start because that's the first thing that happens. But even then, Google, really, the weight is Google because things don't typically hit their full impact for a few months. Right. But we're able to see like, we have a team that makes sure that we're tracking all the pickups that we've gotten and the links that we've gotten. So that's the first thing we report on. The second thing is domain Rating or domain Authority or whichever version of that metric you're looking at, which is to get a better sense of is this reflecting on the overall Sites Authority in the eyes of search engines? So that would come next. And that's like probably around month three that we start tracking that. Because you really need it needs to kind of like mature in the search engine results before it starts to actually reflect in those numbers. And then around month six is when you would start to see the organic traffic start to increase. So, it is an investment. I say investment not just for money, but for time. Because any kind of inbound strategy, anybody who works in SEO has probably had to tell a version of the story many times, where not that you don't see anything early, you see the links, you see the domain authority changes, but you don't see the organic traffic changes until you've done this regularly for at least probably six months.

[29:13] Matt Hepburn: No, I love this strategy. I love the strategy. It's kind of blowing me away. But just because I don't see many businesses doing this type of strategy, I see them syndicating across owned. They don't do it for earned. Sorry. Cat is jumping across.

[29:40] Amanda Milligan: Very relatable. Mine is past dad in the other room, but I have been there.

[29:44] Matt Hepburn: Yeah, he just jumped off by something at Tall. Anyway, and I totally lost my train of thought where I was going with that because this process is really kind of amazing. But I'm. Sure, I'm going to be hitting you up after this interview going well what about this? Well, what about that? But so, could you kind of talk through for publishers or businesses what are the kind of the requirements that they need? It sounds like they need a canonical link back to the original post and a do fall link back to their home page is that it on the.

[30:23] Amanda Milligan: Content essentially and getting the canonical is not going to be something you necessarily have to fight for because it's just kind of how these things work. Like they'll understand, like okay, the canonical is what's showing that you're syndicating it. Like this is how I think the link might be trickier. However, what's been interesting for us is that we don't have 100% confidence in which part of that is driving the most authority. There's a world in which it's the canonical that's driving most of the authority and that's what I mean by it's been not really study. We're working on our own internal studies right now. We've done the client study for ourselves that have shown that the canonicals have made a significant impact on growth, but the industry at large does not necessarily bought into that. But we have really seen, and kind of back to the previous point of how it just makes logical sense that if a top publisher is choosing to republish in full something that you did that is saying something, not just a link, but like, oh, yeah, we're linking to this resource, we're actually republishing it and we trust it so much. So that concept is really interesting to me. But anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. I think that the canonical for sure the link if you can get it, but mostly it's the canonical that makes it a syndication strategy.

[31:50] Matt Hepburn: So question also are all these articles linked to the author bio? The person who do you have a link in that? Does it say or is it just that the fact that it links back to the primary one and the author bio is there?

[32:07] Amanda Milligan: Yeah, it'll depend, I think sometimes. In our case, we work with all kinds. We have an internal writing team, we also work with freelancers sometimes, and we make sure that the person who wrote it gets the credit. So a lot of the times that will carry through to the re-publisher and it will link to them. But I don't want to quote that. That's how everybody does it.

[32:28] Matt Hepburn: No, I hadn't thought about that. That's another link that might be getting some authority from that. So just really fascinating. So, I guess what I would want to say is, what do you recommend? Brands try to start doing this, and we've gotten the time frame, you know, three to six months for them to start going. But how should they try to besides identifying the audience with a tool like Spark Tour or something like that, of sites where they should go, where their audience actually lives? Right. And sites. So, what if we only have a certain amount of sites there that would actually syndicate? Where should they go beyond that? How do they move beyond the other thing? What I lost my train of thought was I was just thinking about the relevancy of the audience and Google is going to pick up on Google entities from that saying, this is such a relevant business, it ties back to the top of your website, so it will add more to your authority as well from that. So, they're getting much better at that with automation, for sure.

[33:46] Amanda Milligan: Yeah. This industry is always fascinating how quickly everything is evolving. Right. Half the time we don't even know the full impact of things.

[33:54] Matt Hepburn: Sorry, my mind is going in three or four different directions from this. This is just opportunities that has pretty impressive.

[34:03] Amanda Milligan: Yeah, I think that going back to your earlier question, it really just depends on how much you're planning on investing in organic. Because the way that I to really back up of where this fits in with everything, the way that I and the way that stacker kind of suggests SEO strategies to be built is you have three pillars. You have your technical SEO on your site, right. You have your content, your onsite content, and then you have your offsite SEO, which is what we're talking about today. So, to me, how you want to approach this is going to depend on is your technical SEO already sound and in line and being monitored? And is your onsite content completely up to snuff and converting people the way you want and driving traffic the way you want and ranking the way you want? Because it's the offsite that amplifies all of that.

[34:55] Matt Hepburn: Absolutely.

[34:56] Amanda Milligan: If you're like. Yes, I'm killing it in technical and content. And now it's time to amplify that's. When you really start investing in this type of strategy and you'll see it lift up everything, all the other work that you've done, if you jump ahead, if you try to do this without doing the other pieces, you'll get the brand awareness. You're not going to suffer for it, but you're not going to get what.

[35:18] Matt Hepburn: You could out of it to that point. Right. I think a lot of listeners who might publish, some might say, hey, this is a great strategy, we're going to do it. What is kind of the occurrences of content that they need? How often do they need to be doing this for this to work? Is this something where they're putting out five to ten pieces per month? Will that work to publishers, or can they do it with less? If it's newsworthy, I don't think you.

[35:48] Amanda Milligan: Have to do a high volume. I think a lot of it comes down to that's. Wonderful. Yeah. Your companies, I think we call it internally, like growth velocity. So how quickly you want to scale. Some people are really high growth. We want to really go for this. And they'll probably do five to ten a month, but we have a lot of clients that do one a month. And that as long as you're I think consistency is the big piece here. Because if you do it once and you drop off, that's not really sending a signal that you're consistently doing anything of value.

[36:24] Matt Hepburn: So, you just made a mention of clients that are doing it with you. Is there an opportunity for businesses to work with Stacker or Stacker Media to be able to accomplish these goals?

[36:37] Amanda Milligan: Oh, absolutely. I think that especially if you're interested, we work with long term partners. So, as I just mentioned, we don't believe in the one and done situation, mainly because you won't really see it impact your organic search. But if you're interested in this model studio, Stacker.com is our site. You can see exactly in more detail how this all works. You can always email me directly, even if you don't want to work with us. I'm happy to chat about any and all of these things. As you can tell, I can talk forever. My email is amilligan@stacker.com feel free to reach out because we've worked with B to B to C, all kinds of companies at different growth stages. I think mostly it's just like if you're willing to make that investment, if you believe in what we're doing, then it could be super interesting. We have a lot of fun working with our brand partners.

[37:30] Matt Hepburn: All right, sounds fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm sure you're going to be getting a lot of context, so thank you so much for coming on the show and we'd love to have you back on the show to talk about this or other strategies in the future.

[37:44] Amanda Milligan: Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Yeah. We'll have to talk newsworthy content next time.

[37:48] Matt Hepburn: All right? That sounds like a perfect topic.

[37:52] Amanda Milligan: Well, thanks so much for having me.

[37:53] Matt Hepburn: All right, well, listen, you have a wonderful day.

[37:56] Amanda Milligan: You too. Take care. Thank you.

[38:02] Matt Hepburn: Are you ready to break through to accelerate your online business growth? Then join our email list at https://emjpodcast.com so that we can keep you up to date with all the latest marketing strategies, tips, and tricks. Also, please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. This is The EMJ Podcast with Matt Hepburn, and we'll see you next time.