Episode 232: Increase Awareness and Traffic for Your Content with Benjamin Dell

Intro:

Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, where food bloggers come to get their fill of the latest tips, tricks, and insights into the world of food blogging. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll provide you with the tools you need to add value to your blog. We’ll also ensure you’re taking care of yourself, because food blogging is a demanding job. Now, please welcome your host, Megan Porta.

Megan Porta:

Hey, food bloggers. Do you ever get caught up in the confusion about how in the world you are going to make money? Take the free quiz I’ve put together for you that is going to help you get to the bottom of this problem. Go to eatblogtalk.com/quiz to find out which stream of revenue is the next perfect one for you. Your results will be personalized based on your answers, and they will provide you with action steps, and resources that will help you launch into monetizing your blogging business in a new way. There are truly so many ways to make money as a food blogger. So don’t waste another second. Again, go to eatblogtalk.com/quiz and get started on your next revenue stream today. Hey guys, just reminding you to head over to iTunes, if you haven’t already to subscribe, rate and review, Eat Blog Talk. It adds value to this podcast when you do that and I would be so grateful for your time. It will take two minutes; press pause, go do it and come back and keep listening.

Hey there, food bloggers. Welcome to another episode of Eat Blog Talk. Thank you so much for joining us today. I have Benjamin Dell with me from missinglettr.com and we are going to have a fun chat about how to increase awareness and traffic for your content. Benjamin Dell is the founder and CEO at Missing Lettr, a social marketing automation company that automatically creates 12 months worth of social content for each blog post you publish. He previously owned a web agency for over 10 years. During this time, he also launched a number of SAS startups, two of which were acquired. Benjamin is passionate about empowering businesses and brands with tools that help them succeed. Benjamin. Hey, I’m super excited to have you here today, but first I know I’m putting you on the spot with us, but we want to hear your fun fact.

Benjamin Dell:

Well, firstly, Megan, thank you both for having me on. It’s a real pleasure. Fun fact. We were just saying off air, one man’s fun fact is another person’s boring sort of detail. So I’m going to try and struggle with the lines and see whether, well, I guess I’ll never know whether it’s perceived as boring or interesting, but let me go. That’s the risk we take. Can you notice, I’m delaying, maybe I don’t have a fun fact. Let’s see. So I’m sitting here, I know the audience can’t see me but on my webcam you can see I’m in my office, which I built myself a year ago. Having never built much before and I almost live every day in fear that the roof is going to come crumbling down on top. No signs that of course it will. But without professional experience, you’ve got to wonder, haven’t you, whether you did the right thing in stringing things together correctly or hammered that nail in the right place. So yeah, that’s my somewhat long, but hopefully fun fact.

Megan:

Yeah, I liked it. So if your roof does fall on you, I will be able to see you at least in the next 30 minutes or so. So I can warn you if I see things crumbling above you. So I’ve got your back. All right, well, let’s turn the tides and talk a little bit about increasing awareness and traffic for your content. This is a topic that food bloggers are going to absolutely devour. So this is going to be great. As you know, things change so often, I feel like, in the social media realm and also the content creation realm. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with it. What are we supposed to be doing? That quote, “supposed” to be. So maybe you can shed some light on this for us. I would love to start off by just asking you, what are your thoughts about content curation still being an effective strategy for social media?

Benjamin:

Yeah, that’s a good question, but I’ll just answer the first one you posed there. Because I think it’s a good way of just leading into the broader topic and that was a question around what are we supposed to be doing? It’s a two-part answer really. It really comes down to whatever works. But whatever works or to establish what works for you, really requires experimentation. So if there’s one thing I’d hope to get across in our conversation today to your audiences is to embrace the idea of experimentation when it comes to promoting your content. It’s very easy in this day and age, I’ll just say things are moving quickly in terms of industry and best practice and all that sort of thing. So it’s easy to assume that a particular approach will work or won’t work or has a certain sort of negative connotation or whatever those sorts of reservations might be.

But give it a go. Experiment, try things out and see what works for you. Because again, that protocol or that sort of point at the beginning of, one man’s interesting fact is someone else’s boring sort of bit of information. The same applies for promotional tactics, whatever that happens to be. What works for you won’t necessarily work for someone else. The same goes the other way. So always take advice that you’re listening to, whether it’s from me, ironically, or from anyone else, with a pinch of salt because you’re literally reading into someone’s very specific experience with their content, with their setup, with their background of experience and all that sort of stuff. So embrace the idea of experimentation and, and you’re off to a good start.

Megan:

How long do you recommend experimenting with something? Because we hear this a lot too, in our space. Try something different if what you’re doing isn’t working. Maybe go a different route and then we do for a little while and we see that it’s not working. So we change routes again. How long do you recommend sticking with a new experimental strategy?

Benjamin:

Yeah, well, we’ve all been there. So that’s, first of all, you’re not alone in what you’ve just posed there, which is I’m trying something, I’m bashing my head against the wall, hopefully not this office wall, or it might come crumbling down. It’s not working. It can feel really demoralizing and you feel like you’ve failed. Actually that the reality or the misconception here is that we’re led to believe that experimentation requires multiple experimentations. We’ve got to throw everything at the challenge. So I need to be doing social. I need to be doing paid ads. I need to be doing podcasts. I need to be doing YouTube videos, all the things. Actually, it’s the exact reverse of that when we’re talking about experimentation. Focusing what you’re experimenting on and being very intentional about that one, maybe two things that you’re going to experiment with, is actually the key.

So start from that. Then the next question rises, how much time and effort should I be spending and potentially money, should I be spending on that experiment? If you’re focused on one thing, let’s take paid ads as an example. It hopefully will follow that there’ll be a somewhat sensible approach that you can take, which would be something along the lines of four to six weeks of doing XYZ ed with two week sort of review points. Give yourself enough time to actually take in the data that you’re collecting. The reason I said it sort of naturally follows is that if you aren’t just choosing one thing to focus on, it should be quite easy to come up with what feels like a meaningful amount of time and money or resources to spend on it.

On the flip side, if you’re starting off from a point of, I’m going to try all five things all in one go, it actually becomes very difficult to work out what a good plan looks like because they overlap that one sort of eats the resources of the other one, and it just becomes a bit of a mess. So start from that point of clarity first. Again, it really depends. Paid ads, it’s probably more about the money you’re putting at it and time to a certain extent. Whereas other things might be a pure time-based exercise in terms of the parameters for that experiment.

Megan:

I think we find this too in our space, because there’s so much to do. I mean, there’s different streams of revenue we can tackle, and there’s also different projects. Then people talk about like, you have to niche down. So we’re constantly finding or trying to find that super micro niche. So there’s so many things, and it’s hard to know exactly what to focus on. But I love hearing just one or two, just to focus on one or two things at a time. So you just gave us permission to just do a couple of things.

Benjamin:

In an ideal world, you will carry through the experiences and the learnings from the previous exercise or experiment through to the next one. That’s really quite easy to do if you’re going from one to another. But actually if you’re doing five all at once, how do you disseminate what those learnings are? It actually becomes really sort of confused and crowded in terms of that knowledge that you’ve gained from it. Because remember, even if it’s failed, it’s still knowledge. But if you’ve got five failed things, how can you really attribute the failure or the learning to a particular thing that you did? So, yeah, you need to be mindful of learning and bringing that forward through to the next experiment.

Megan:

I love how you said that. That was great. Carrying your lessons forward that you learn is actually going to help your next project. Such a great thing to keep in mind. Okay. Let’s go back to that other question about content curation being an effective strategy on social media. What do you think about that?

Benjamin:

Yeah. Look, your audience are content creators, in food blogging, hopefully there’s a lot of creative stuff that you’re doing outside of the written word. But fundamentally the way that you present that is through the written word, in most cases, interwoven with videos, I’m sure. But you’re creating content. So we’re already in that world of content creation. The way I like to see this, is the same different sides to the same coin. You’ve got content creation and then you’ve got content curation. One is where you are creating it and the other one is where you are finding other people’s content as a means for sharing it with your audience to help increase the amount of knowledge, I suppose, and value that you’re able to share with your audience.

Let’s knock this back to a simple example. If we’re blogging, I’m just gonna take an example here. Let’s say once a week. With the best will in the world, there’s only a certain amount of tweets and Facebook posts or information that you can include in a newsletter about that post. You might have opinion pieces or other things that are unrelated to that blog post, but still, there’s not a huge amount. So combining that with some content that you’ve curated from other people, can be a really powerful way of showing that you are the owner of that niche, whether that’s baking, whether it’s savory dishes, whatever it happens to be, sharing other people’s content within that space can be really, really powerful.

So I guess the key lesson here is don’t be afraid to share other people’s content. We’re very used to doing it in newsletters and indeed actually in social work, we’re quite used to sharing or retweeting other people’s content when we find it of high value. What we’re talking about here in terms of social curation is it’s just taking it one step up, being a little bit more methodical about it and going actually, if I can pre-select, let’s say, a range of content from other people in my space, or maybe in related spaces, like kitchenware, for example, might be a good example. Where it’s not a directly competing brand, but it’s absolutely complimentary. If I can pre-select content from this range of people and create social posts around those and add that to my calendar or my queue or whatever it happens to be that you’re using. Then that’s a really powerful sort of mix of an output. Some of your posts are directly linking back to your site. Some are you sharing with other people. It’s just a way of creating a healthy output. It puts you at the center of that knowledge around that subject matter that you know your audience cares about.

Megan:

It takes a burden off our shoulders. It doesn’t require us to create all of it. I love that you made that distinction between creators and curators. Thank you for doing that. Yeah, it just helps us to breathe a sigh of relief. Okay, I don’t have to do this all. It also helps other people. So if you’re sharing other bloggers’ content, it helps them. If you’re sharing other brands’ content, it helps them. It also gives you an opportunity to maybe work with the brand and partner with them and say, Hey, look, I share your content all the time. I love it. Would you mind defining Benjamin, what the difference is between influencers and small businesses? Because I know food bloggers kind of toe the line with identifying with both.

Benjamin:

Well, I think that’s reasonable, I think to be fair. Because you can be both at once. I think you’ll probably get slightly different answers depending on who you’re talking to, but from my perspective, a small business suggests that there’s a business underpinning that entity, that goes beyond the fact that they’re influencing a particular space or that they have knowledge about a particular subject. So they might be selling crafts or kitchenware or even just membership to something. But there is a business behind it. That goes beyond just being an authority on a particular subject matter. Whereas an influencer just, you could almost say an influencer is a subset of a small business, I suppose. It really just refers to this notion that you are someone or a brand that has the capacity to influence within your audience. The great thing about an influencer I suppose, is that actually, it doesn’t matter to what extent or scale your audience is.

You can have an audience of one and you are still an influencer to that one person. That’s powerful because really all it is recognizing is that, assuming you have a relationship with an audience, as I say, from anything from one to 1 million and beyond of course, you have an opportunity to share information with them and influence their thought process, their decision-making process, their buying process hopefully in a moral and ethical way. That’s really powerful because it should be empowering for you to recognize that you have that opportunity to influence in a positive way. But it’s also powerful on the other side to recognize that the brands might really like the fact that you have an influence over a particular niche or some subset of an audience. You can only give before about curating content. The idea that it can put you on the radar of another brand or another business or influencer is great because you create those relationships. If they see that you have an influence over a particular audience, or you just have an audience, great conversations and opportunities can arise from that.

Megan:

I love that. So we really are both. A lot of us are business owners. We consider ourselves business owners. So we are small businesses. We’re trying to make a profit, but we’re also trying to help people. Because we are authorities in certain areas, that makes us influencers as well. So we’re both.

Benjamin:

Yeah. Don’t undersell yourself. You’ve got your core business, but simply recognizing that you have an audience of X, whatever that is, 500 to 2 million. Recognize that there is a value in that. A responsibility as well, of course. As I said, being ethical and positive in terms of how you engage with them, but there’s a real opportunity there to deepen that relationship and everything else that entails.

Megan:

Okay. I have a question about the importance of social media, because we kind of get that whole sense that social media is super important. We have to be on all the channels, all the platforms. Being active on Instagram, and some people believe Facebook. I don’t know, it’s kind of a dying thing in some worlds. But what do you think about that?

Benjamin:

I think social is a really important part of the overall jigsaw, which is marketing and how you get your word out there. But just recognizing, I suppose, that it’s not the be all and end all. It should be a part of your marketing output, but not the only thing. But it’s one of those, because it’s hyper technology. What does that mean? But because it’s high tech in that sort of sense that it doesn’t require you printing a book and sending, that doesn’t have a tie to cost with it or anything else. It is so accessible, so easy to create as well as to consume, it almost bucks the original advice that I gave at the beginning. Which is around experimentation and just focusing on one thing. Because with social media, you can afford to actually be across all of the social networks, or certainly the major ones. Let’s just name the top four; Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. There is almost no excuse not to be active in those four networks. Albeit at the same time, you might only have one of those where you are, let’s call it super active, where you’re actually committing to. This will vary depending on where your audience lives and demographics and all sorts of things. But let’s imagine that you have a really active Facebook group and that’s where you spent most of your time. But you don’t do anything on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. My argument would be actually because of the nature of social media, there’s no excuse not to be active on those other three networks. But that doesn’t mean that you become less active on Facebook, if that’s where your audience is. Social media platforms like Missing Lettr, but it doesn’t have to be Missing Lettr. It could be Buffer or Hootsuite or anything else. They enable you to really quickly and easily be active on all of those networks in a way that takes the thought process out. You can automate that sort of marketing aspect of it. There you are, you, you instantly almost just broadened your audience.

Megan:

Can you define active? So you say be active on all of the platforms, if possible. How many times a week would you say that is?

Benjamin:

So I think we can make the distinction between posting and nurturing a community. Let’s think of it in those terms. So simply posting your content, whether it’s curated content, whether it’s you talking about a blog post you’ve just published or whether it’s just you tweeting an opinion about a new gizmo that’s come out or whatever it happens to be, that is you posting on social media. That for me is the table stakes. There’s no excuse not to be active in that sense across all of the four major and potentially beyond social networks. That’s you going into buffer or Missing Lettr or wherever you prefer to do it and creating one social post. Let’s take that example of commenting or sharing our opinion on a new kitchen gadget that’s come out. Writing at once, knowing that it’s going to be sent to all four social networks. It’s literally as quick as sending one. You’re just using a platform to send it to all four in one go. That is active in terms of just posting. The next bit then raises the question around community and where are you spending your time building that community. This comes back to that experimentation piece and that notion of focusing on what you’re doing versus trying to do all things to all men. Because the reality is that it takes a lot of time and effort, as I’m sure your audience knows, to really nurture an audience across social media. Whether it’s a Facebook group, just being present. Asking questions, helping new members work out how to do things, and whatever that happens to be. So that takes more effort. I would argue, certainly start off with just one social network to sort of go that deep into. You can certainly broaden out once you’ve got more capacity. But think of it in those two terms. Post across all, but initially build that audience in just one network.

Megan:

What do you feel about posting the exact same content across multiple platforms? So the same thing on Facebook, Instagram.

Benjamin:

I think we tend to get quite hung up on this. I think as individuals. I think it’s easy to do, and it’s easy to see why, because we can very easily illustrate in our mind and picture one tweet or one post, whatever the word and image is. We can very much visualize it going out, duplicated across all four. It’s easy to just picture that scenario. But in reality your audience aren’t necessarily following you across all four. Certainly, from my perspective, for the brands that I follow, depending on the nature of, I suppose it comes down to that building of community, depending on where I can tell they are focusing on building a community, I will follow them on one or the other. So Twitter or Facebook is generally where I would follow, but it’s very rare that I will follow them on both.

So I think of course there’s always exceptions, but I think we fear too much that we have an individual follower who is literally following us across all of our social accounts. If they did that, they might well see the same post to go out. But I think it’s far less likely than you might think. But even so, it’s all at Missing Lettr, you can set, set up your time slots, let’s say and they, they will be different by design. So you might have the same post going out, but one would Twitter at two in the morning, silly example, maybe eight in the morning. One might go to Facebook at two in the afternoon. So that there would often always be that time difference anyway. But generally speaking, don’t worry about it too much. I think it’s not as bad as you might think.

Megan:

It’s possible that people on different platforms might enjoy different presentations of your content. So maybe someone on Facebook enjoys really watching videos and maybe people on Instagram, like your beautiful photography. So you might have to, like you said earlier on, experiment with that and see what people are liking. What do you think about that?

Benjamin:

Yes, exactly. I mean, that’s definitely the next stage. So level one, if you will, is just make sure that when you’re composing a social post, that you’re sending it to all four of the main networks. Don’t worry too much about it being the same content. But level two is absolutely what you’re talking about, which is, hang on. There’s Twitter here that has a limit of 280 characters, but I don’t have that limit on Facebook. Actually in Instagram, it’s much more a photo centric experience. So straight away, hopefully will lead you to just invest a bit more time into experimenting, but also just recognizing that each one will certainly benefit, doesn’t necessarily needed in the early days, but will certainly benefit from having a slightly different length of word style of writing, but also media that goes with it.

But again, don’t get hung up on thinking that every single post that you send to Instagram or let’s say Facebook has to be more than 280 characters. Start off by just maybe one out of 10, just spend that extra time doing a slightly customized version of Facebook versus Twitter. Just build from there, work out what works, what resonates and crucially, which bits you enjoy the most because if you’re terrible at writing, well, hopefully you’re not, if you’re a blogger, but imagine you are terrible at writing long and lengthy things, stick to the short ones initially. There’s harm in that. Play to your strengths.

Megan:

That’s funny. I’m sitting here thinking about how I cater to the different platforms and I don’t post on Twitter. Actually I might do automated posts. I haven’t logged into Twitter for years. I rarely go on LinkedIn, but I do focus on Facebook and Instagram. If I sit down to write a post for Facebook and the same thing for Instagram, I write totally differently. I can’t even put words to that. Do you know what I mean? I know who I’m talking to and it’s different over here. I know one has to be a little bit longer. One has to be a little bit more casual and fun. So it’s really funny that we get to know the personalities of the people who show up in different areas and we cater to that without even really thinking about it.

Benjamin:

That’s interesting because I would, I’m guessing here, but when you first started out in those networks, maybe you were doing more of the level one where you were kind of just doing the same thing to both. But as you say, you’ve built up this understanding and second sense almost of how they like to be engaged with on that network. You’ve kind of naturally evolved to level two where you’re now just customizing the output for that particular audience on that network. That’s great. I mean, that’s what you should be aiming for. It’s all just a balance of your time and everything else that sort of factors in.

Megan:

It’s like they’re different friends and you know their personalities and you’re just talking to a different friend. Of course, you’re going to say different things to this friend because she’s this and that friend wouldn’t like that. So yeah, it’s really cool to think about that. Okay. I need to get your opinion on hashtags because this is a widely debated topic in our space. Do we use them, how many do we use? How much do we research? Does it really matter? I would love to hear your thoughts on all of that.

Benjamin:

So it’s not a be all and end all. Ultimately if you don’t like hashtags, just don’t use them. It won’t be the difference between you succeeding or not. Because some people just actively don’t like them and it doesn’t mesh with their style. At the end of the day, whether it’s 280 character posts or longer form Facebook posts, it’s still your creative output. It should follow that anything you’re outputting on writing creatively, sort of matches up with your style and what’s important to you and everything else. If you find that hashtags jar with that, that’s no problem, leave it out, don’t include them. But if you’re not in that camp, then definitely yes, they can help.

But don’t get too hung up on them. Certainly don’t fall into the fallacy of needing to, or feeling as if you need to be following the trends of the day. Because I think in the day, if you’re catching a trend, you’re probably catching it too late. Even those trends, there are so many of them. So many people are hashtagging with that particular thing. So think of it more as a signpost, is the way I like to think about it. That has the opportunity to garner discovery. But think of it as a signpost rather than discovery. What I mean by that is that we’ve often been sort of geared up to think of it as a discovery mechanism. Like if I hashtag with this particular tag, it’s going to help lots of people find me and that can happen, of course, and that’s fundamentally what it’s there to do.

But what I think is more effective, is to think of it more as a signpost. What I mean by that is let’s imagine we’re writing something about kitchenware or a new recipe or something else. Use those hashtags as ways of literally signposting the broader topic or subject matter that you’re talking about. So, it’s gotta be natural, it’s gotta be relevant, so it could be gluten free or it could be vegan or whatever it might be. Yes, it doubles up as a discovery mechanism, but you’re adding it because it adds value to the overall piece of content. It acts as a signpost so that when people are scanning down their social feeds and in fact, a great example of this is maybe it’s just my Twitter client. I don’t use the official one, but a different one on my iPhone.

They’re now highlighting hashtags in red. Which means they really stand out. So the hashtags act as a really quick way to catch someone’s attention and signal to them what it is you’re talking about. So you really want them to join up and to make sense of what you’re talking about. If it also means that people discover you because people have searched for vegan and they’ve stumbled across yours, all the better. But start off from a point of, does this actually help explain or add context? Does it anchor the content that I’m actually writing in the first place?

Megan:

Do you personally have a hashtag strategy that you use? Like a number of hashtags or different levels of popularity, that sort of thing?

Benjamin:

I don’t get too hung up on the popularity side of things. Although in Missing Lettr, we are working on a pretty cool update that will really help. One of the things that we do is we’ll extract and create a year’s worth of social content for each blog post that you publish. From that we’ll work out hashtags for you and everything else. So we’re doing a lot of clever things that will help you understand which, out of the ones that you’ve chosen, those hashtags that we have generated for you, which ones are the most popular. Because you might as well, as long as they’re relevant, you might as well choose the most popular ones. But generally speaking, for me personally, I like to choose one to three. I generally don’t like more than three, just as a personal preference. I just like to make sure that it at least joins up with the subject matter that we’re talking about.

Megan:

Right. Okay. That’s cool. I like that. That kind of takes weight off our shoulders too, because we were given 30 or whatever it is. We feel like we need to use all those 30, but we really don’t. If you have three that really align with what you’re talking about in your posts, then use those three, and that’s kind of what you’re saying. We don’t need to go overboard just because they’re there.

Benjamin:

Well, now I’m going to just reverse half of what I’ve just said, actually, because he’s a little bit different and this is where each network does have different sorts of nuances. I certainly don’t think we’re in the days of, the early days of Instagram where you plastered it with 30, is really what you need to be doing today. But an Instagram post can cope with a few more than three. So maybe anything up to sort of five to eight is certainly reasonable within Instagram. I think generally speaking on the other networks, three is a good sort of happy medium, but you can go a little bit more on Instagram, I think.

Megan:

Okay, cool. Thank you for that. Then I have the mother of all questions. Benjamin, what is the most important thing an influencer slash small business can do to improve their social media effectiveness?

Benjamin:

Hmm, good question. I think just make sure that you are on social media. I know that sounds really obvious, but make sure you’re on social media. If you’re only on Facebook, just start sending things out to at least Twitter and LinkedIn. If you can, Instagram as well. Start off from there, level one, as we referred to it before. Just get the ball rolling and get comfortable with sharing the same thing to the same ones and then experiment from there. Just getting out there and being comfortable with that is really important. But going back to the point before, you’re probably still going to have the main network that you care about the most. If that is the case, make sure you update the other social network bios so that they link back to that. So for example, if you are nurturing a community on Facebook, on a Facebook group, you might relate or refer to that in your Twitter bio and say head over to Facebook, to our Facebook community, for all the good stuff or whatever it might be.

So that when people do discover you there, they know where to follow up with to get more information, et cetera. But that’s the table stakes. The rest of it really is, I think particularly for your audience, I do think it’s worth checking out the drip campaigns feature that we have. I alluded to this idea that each blog post can be automatically converted into a year’s worth of social media content. I think for content creators, whether you Missing Lettr or not, creating a year’s worth, or at least a few months worth of social content to promote each blog post that you publish is really key. Because one thing I’ve learned back in the agency days actually is that it’s very easy. It’s very natural to publish a blog post and think, oh, I must just mention this on Twitter or Facebook.

So people will post something along the lines of just publishing the blog post on X, Y, Z, check it out. That will get a few clicks, but most people, if left to their own devices, will just forget to do anything after that point and will just move on to the next blog post, as important as that is. But actually the real value and opportunity here is if we can drip out a social post over the next 12 months, or at least a certain number of months, linking back to that original blog post with different content each time, of course, then it draws out that half-life if you will, of engagement and traffic that you can generate for each blog post. So it’s really, really powerful as a way to, as I say, drive traffic back to that blog post. So check that out, or at least just take on board the principle of a, sort of a drip campaign.

Megan:

So Missing Lettr, and actually it’s funny because Missing Lettr has a missing letter, right? There’s a missing e there.

Benjamin:

Just to keep you on your toes.

Megan:

So it’s L E T T R. You guys should check it out. How would you compare it to Buffer? I cannot think of the other one. It’s just escaping me. I use buffer. It’s okay. I mean, it works. I’m sure Missing Lettrs way better. How does it compare to something like Buffer?

Benjamin:

So there’s a lot I could say, but I will save your audience from the pain of it all. There’s a huge amount that we do that is different from Buffer but I think, and indeed for pretty much any social network out there or social management tool. I think the key point, really, if we look at Buffer as an example, is that they put all of the onus, all of the responsibility on you, the owner of that account, to create the social posts yourself. So you now need to be responsible for turning up every day or once a week. You need to remember. We’re humans at the end of the day and habits are hard to stick to. Been there. Crucially, once we remember to login to Buffer, we need to remember to top it up with content.

We need to compose that content. So if we’d go back to that analogy of publishing a blog post, and then coming up with a year’s worth of social posts for that blog post, it takes time and effort and brain power to write this? Which quotes are the best ones to use? What imagery do I need to use? Because you don’t want to be using the same post multiple times. With Missing Lettr, although you can just treat it like a Buffer where you just have a calendar or a cue that you just keep topped up with your own content, the real power is that we help you add content to your calendar automatically. Based on your blog posts and Indeed, YouTube videos, if you’re publishing those. So we are a lot more opinionated about why you’re using social media and we believe it stems in this notion that you have content. You need to find ways to promote it and our job is to help you come up with automatic naturally worded, effective social posts that are ready to go, and you just need to click go and we’ll drip it out for you. So we remove that need for you to form a healthy habit, remember to turn up each day and just get a basic start across social media so that you can really invest that time nurturing your community in the ways that we discussed before.

Megan:

Sounds amazing. Do you guys have a free trial or anything like that that we could get started with?

Benjamin:

So we have a free plan, first of all. So no pressure at all. You’ll try it out on one of the social networks and you can use a good number of the features that we have. But we also have free trials for our solo and pro plans. Check it out, missinglettr.com.

Megan:

How long has Missing Lettr been around?

Benjamin:

So we’ve been going for around five years now.

Megan:

Oh, okay. That’s great. Cool. Everyone check it out. Is there anything Benjamin that we’ve missed that you feel like we need to touch on regarding our amazing topic today?

Benjamin:

That’s it. It is a broad topic and as long as you embody experimentation at the core of it, you will be fine. But if you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter, which is at Bendell, B E N D E L L. Happy to answer any questions, but if you have any questions specifically about Missing Lettr, hit the support button on our sites. And as I say, if you’ve got a specific question about anything I’ve raised here, happy to follow up over Twitter.

Megan:

Awesome. Well, I’m putting you on the spot again, Benjamin. Before you go, I like to ask my guests if they have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to share with my listeners.

Benjamin:

Panic. I don’t think I do. I’m one of those weird people, I like to consume for inspiration, which is ironic because they ask me for an inspirational quote but I don’t live my life by them. So I don’t really follow, I don’t drag anything around with me in terms of quotes that inspire me. I suppose the one that I care about the most is, now thinking about it, Steve Jobs quotes that I’ll probably bastardize now, which is this idea that aiming for where the hockey puck is heading, not for where it is now. You’ve got to sort of your job as the business owner. No matter the scale that your company is to second guess where the industry and your customers are going. What they ultimately need, not what they’re saying is the problem now.

Because if you’re asking, I think was it Ford? He said right in the back and he said, well, what is it you’d need? What is it you’d like most out of your horse? They said just a faster horse. Of course they weren’t thinking of cars. They hadn’t been invented yet. So just think carefully, you know, be confident in your own vision. Check in with customers and readers along the way to make sure that they are liking what you’re doing, but ultimately have faith and confidence in what you set out to do in the first place.

Megan:

I love that. See, look, you pulled out two, amazingly famous dudes from the past.

Benjamin:

Well, who knows if you check them. We’ll probably find them completely misinterpreted, but that sounds good on that.

Megan:

I love that. That’s a great way to end. Well, thank you so much for being here, Benjamin. It’s been so fun to chat with you. A great way to start my day. Also, I just wanted to mention, we will put together a show notes page for you. So if anyone wants to go peek at those, you can go to eatblogtalk.com/missinglettr. Don’t forget, letter has a missing E. Ben, you told everyone where to find you on Twitter. Are you on Instagram? Can people find you on there as well?

Benjamin:

It’s the same Bendell. I haven’t used it in quite a while. I’d like to come to get photos of that, but they’re quite old. Yeah, Twitter’s the main one for me.

Megan:

Awesome. Well, thanks again for being here and thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you next time.

Outro:

We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.