Apr 9, 2019
Hello, and welcome to The Story Engine podcast. Today, we have Madeleine Lambert. Madeleine is somebody who I met at an event a few years ago. I was very impressed with her story. Madeleine is the founder of a very successful content marketing agency that is built around excellent processes. She's been able to remove herself from the day-to-day operations of the business. This is a great episode for anybody who wants to bring more scalability or who wants to remove themselves from the day-to-day operations of their business by using excellent processes.
Key Takeaways
[3:26] The catalyst that enabled Madeleine to scale her business while being hands-off
[5:07] Transitioning from a one-person show to building a team
[7:43] Building a strong team
[8:45] The best way to work with contractors
[12:25] How to find the right writer
[14:00] Content Upgrade Strategy: Distinguishing and utilizing your best content
[16:46] What platform to use to identify your top content
[17:44] Content marketing strategies
[20:50] How to get started scaling your business
Links and Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Content Refined Templates (password: PODCAST)
Transcript
Kyle Gray:
Hello, and welcome to The Story Engine podcast. My name is Kyle Gray. Apologies if you can hear any background noise in this introduction. I'm not in my normal podcasting studio right now. I'm actually in Fribourg, Switzerland in a cafe overlooking the most incredible valley, a river, and beautiful thousand-year-old Swiss buildings. I've been traveling through Switzerland and Europe for the last two weeks and just wanted to squeeze in this one podcast intro to make sure that you all are getting content while I am traveling.
Kyle Gray:
I also have a special solo episode coming up soon that will talk a little bit more about my adventure out here. But for today, we have Madeleine Lambert. Madeleine is somebody who I met at an event a few years ago. I was very impressed with her story. The original impetus and inspiration for setting up her business in this way was because she discovered she was pregnant. She wanted to give herself on maternity leave and baby-proof her business. She worked hard on developing foolproof processes, SOPs, and building a great team so that she could step away when her baby was born and how her business still be running perfectly, even while she was away.
Kyle Gray:
Without any further ado, let's give it over to Madeleine. Madeleine Lambert, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I'd like to open this show, though, I'm very excited. You've got a lot of great wisdom in the content marketing world. As I was telling you before the call, listeners of the show absolutely love that. But before we get into that, I wanna open this how I usually open the show with. Tell me a story about a moment, or a turning point in your life that has really defined who you are and what you're doing today. Then tell us a little bit more about yourself, and how you're making an impact in the world today.
Madeleine Lambert:
Sure. First of all, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm super stoked. Second of all, okay, so answering your question, am I going back to childhood or this like?
Kyle Gray:
Whatever. Some people like to share about childhood, some people have an adolescent one. Or some people, it's just whatever eureka moment that helped them create their business.
Madeleine Lambert:
All right. Well, let's talk about the moment that I found out that I was pregnant. I think that's great-
Kyle Gray:
I think that is a good one.
Madeleine Lambert:
I think that's a really good one because it has definitely shaped who I am today. It definitely made me really, really evaluate the business, and figure out how it was gonna possibly run without me. Because I found out I got pregnant, or sorry, I found out I was pregnant, almost I guess it was like just before the one-year anniversary of the business. I needed to figure out how I was going to get the business, I guess proceduralized well enough so that I can step away from it because I really wanted to spend that time with my baby.
Kyle Gray:
Oh, wow. I think I remember because this is I think I met you in progress of your second child.
Madeleine Lambert:
First child.
Kyle Gray:
That was the first child. Oh, so you were telling the story. This is you were sharing about, speaking about some of these procedures. First, tell us about your business. Then tell us about some of those procedures that you had to do to make your business baby-proof.
Madeleine Lambert:
Sure. Oh, I like that baby-proof. Basically, my business is called Content Refined. It's a content marketing agency at this point, I'd say. What we do is we are a content-creation agency, who helps clients create really great quality, really consistent, and really relevant content for their websites, which, in turn, will increase Google traffic. That's the bread and butter what we do. Then in order to make my business baby-proof, I basically had to create SOPs because I hadn't really done that.
Kyle Gray:
Before this, were you creating some of this content yourself or you're doing a lot of this writing yourself?
Madeleine Lambert:
When we first started, it was definitely a one-woman show. I was doing a little bit of writing. I think I had one writer and I had one virtual assistant. That's about it. When we started, I really was starting from the ground up. As we started to grow very quickly, I was just going with it and just trying to figure out ways to survive. Because we were so busy, things were picking up so quickly that I was just having a really hard time finding time to breathe, so procedures were the last thing on my mind. When I got pregnant, I really had to step back and be like, "Okay, this is not going to be scalable unless I start putting some really solid systems in place and building out teams the way I should be." That's when I started looking at my org chart, which of course, I was splattered all over, figuring out ways that I was going to systematically fill that org chart and scale the business.
Kyle Gray:
That is a beautiful way starting from a very visual tool, which I like visual tools, especially when thinking about all of these complex and multifaceted things. It's a great way to get all of the information in one place that you can work with it all and slowly progress through it. I think great systems are really one of the keys of a business. Not just having these repeatable systems and SOPs like what you were talking about, but I think even your systems and your approaches to solving that problem and thinking about the problem. I think that we can learn a lot from that in our own businesses. We've got good SOPs, and I'm wondering how you create good culture because I think that there's another element of that. I think having good iron-clad SOPs and processes, make sure that things run reliably. But you also wanna o have an amazing team that is on board with who you are and what you're doing and really wants to put their best into stuff. How did you set up the company with a really good team to make sure that things were we're running at the quality levels you want it?
Madeleine Lambert:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a loaded question because I feel as though we have two different tiers of types of employees. We have a very small core team. There's me, my business partner. Then we have three full-time project managers that are all in-house. Then the rest of our team is remote and contractors. The team culture that we have in-house is very, very close. We're all very good friends. We care deeply for one another. We have a lot of fun. We do fun things. We go on cool outings. We work hard, but we also play hard. The culture that we have with our contractors is a little bit different. What I mean by that, and this might sound super cold-hearted, but what I mean by that is, we actually get rid of the bottom 10% of all of our contractors every month. It sucks. It's cutthroat, but it has to be. That is because contractors possess skills that are not unique to them. They are completely replaceable.
Madeleine Lambert:
We have been burned and had been burned so many times by flaky contractors. People that just ghosted us. People that were consistently late with projects. That we just got to a point where we're like, "Okay, we're gonna start a rating system of our contractors. We're gonna review it every month." We're gonna get rid of people who aren't performing at the standard that we need in order to operate a business that is highly, highly reliant on quality.
Kyle Gray:
Do you remember some of those metrics?
Madeleine Lambert:
Yes, absolutely. If somebody is late with an assignment, that's a point against them. If somebody isn't communicating properly if people are turning in things that aren't really up to standard. We have great tools that rank that stuff. We have Copyscape that will spit out a percentage of how much of an article plagiarized. These are all things that we will check, and that we will basically rate against the contractor.
Kyle Gray:
Wow, that's really cool. You have this nice self-cleansing, though somewhat. I'm sure it's not always the most fun system or challenging system to really work with, but you've got a self-cleansing team of contractors that work really well for you.
Madeleine Lambert:
Absolutely. This isn't a surprise or a trick. They all know that this is what we're looking for. They know that we're checking in. If they are cheating the system, or if they're going to be continually late, they are very aware that they're probably not gonna be working for the company for very long.
Kyle Gray:
I think that's a great way to handle contractors. I think it's a really big challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs to be able to manage contractors like that because it can be such a challenging thing to find reliable talent. It can be really short-lived with contractors sometimes.
Madeleine Lambert:
It can be or it can super long-lived. My best contractor has been with me since day one.
Kyle Gray:
That's amazing.
Madeleine Lambert:
She's my best writer. She has worked her way up from a very junior writer to a senior writer. She manages her own team. She is my most reliable writer. She's been with me since day one. I truly believe that they exist. It's a matter of cleansing. If you don't cleanse, you're gonna sink your business.
Kyle Gray:
Another challenge I've found with people or a common question I get in this area is I know a lot of people who have somewhat esoteric businesses. Maybe they're in some specific field of health or write about programming. Or things that are a little bit more challenging to write about in detail. Do you work with clients like that? How do you find writers that do? Do you have a team of writers? Are there ways that you can work around really esoteric fields?
Madeleine Lambert:
That's a great question. We do have different, I guess, we would call them just standard writers. Then we have premium writers, who are specialized in their fields. For example, we have a few clients that are really into the business and finance world. We have a couple of writers that are Chartered Accountants, that can actually write useful content that will be useful for these clients and really hit home with their audiences. Yes, we definitely cater to people who have more specialized fields. We will actually recruit writers in those fields.
Kyle Gray:
Wow. I think that now is a good time. I love exploring team. This is definitely something, a topic I could just talk about all day. But you also were sharing, before we hopped on the recording, that you have this system for evaluating your content and keeping. It's not quite repurposing, but it's making sure that the good-tongue content you create is staying as relevant as possible, which I think is one of the most competitive and challenging aspects of content these days. A lot of people just have the approach of create, create, create, create, create, which can only get you so far. It can be a treadmill without some of these strategies that you were sharing and have a presentation on. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Madeleine Lambert:
Yeah, absolutely. This is called a content upgrade strategy. We actually have called the Credo upgrade strategy because it's based on the concept that 20% of your articles are probably driving about 80% of your revenue, so you really need to hone in and pay attention to those articles. Make sure that they are ranking for the keywords that they need to rank for. What we're seeing a lot of, over the last little while, is people coming to us and being, "Hey, I was ranking for this. This article was driving so much traffic. We were doing so well. I was making so much money just off of this one article. It was driving most of my revenue. All of a sudden, my rankings have plummeted. I'm not making as much money. I don't know what to do." That forced us. We found a need for that.
Kyle Gray:
That's pretty much, and what you're saying is that if you're in the business of content, that's inevitable these days, right? Google is gonna change the rules all the time. You never know what's gonna happen. You've always gotta be ready for things like this if content is your strategy.
Madeleine Lambert:
For sure, for sure. What we have been doing is leveraging some of our tools. We use SEMrush a lot in terms of figuring out exactly what keywords certain articles are ranking for. Then we use that in conjunction with Google Analytics and Ahrefs and come up with a content upgrade and strategy. We figure out and identify which articles are losing their positions fast. Then we figure out what keywords are probably the most important for that article. Then, we will actually scrape that article off of your website. We'll get our editors to read it. We'll run it through this tool called MarketMuse, which will help us identify content gaps that you might have missed. We'll literally fill those gaps with more content. We'll add usually between 500 to 2000 words of content to your existing article. We'll edit it. We'll make sure that it's relevant so change dates.
Madeleine Lambert:
If there are any new groundbreaking sub-topics that would do well in supporting your article, we'll add those. We'll really give it a facelift and a massive boost. What we've seen with this are staggering results. I have case studies on it. It's insane. Everybody should be doing this.
Kyle Gray:
What is a really simple first step that somebody can implement, or one tool that they can use to really try this out and get results like this?
Madeleine Lambert:
I would probably use SEMrush to identify what articles are slipping because they have a really, really great historical view, where you can see how much traffic certain keywords and certain articles were getting before. Then how many positions they've lost within the last little while. I would use SEMrush to help identify those pieces of content.
Kyle Gray:
I think that's great. Coming up with continuous content, I know that for some people, they have a very much like create great content and promote that, or always have lots of fresh content too. Where do you fall on that? From what you were just saying, you really wanna double down on your great content. You also consistently are creating fresh content. How do you balance those priorities for your clients?
Madeleine Lambert:
That's a great question. That really depends on what kind of website and what kind of business the client has. That's how we like to approach it. I don't think that every content marketing strategy is the same. They shouldn't be the same based on what kind of business you have. For example, if you have an Amazon affiliate website, that's gonna be treated much differently than if you have a productized service business that you're promoting. For an Amazon affiliate client, I would just suggest pumping out as much content as you can for as long as you can and refresh some of the older stuff to make it relevant for today. But there doesn't have to be much cross-promotion and social media coordination, stuff like that for those kinds of sites, right?
Madeleine Lambert:
If we're working with a client that has, for example, productized service or who have a website that's supporting some other brick-and-mortar business, that's gonna be treated completely differently. That's when we'll sit down. We'll make sure that social media strategies are congruent with and email marketing strategies are congruent with the topics that we're coming up with that we can help them promote on several different platforms.
Kyle Gray:
I think that's fantastic. That's a really interesting approach. I think it's something important that everybody out there needs to consider. Where do you fall and what your priorities are? If I'm making sure I'm clear here, if you have a lower ticket or affiliate item, then you want a lot of content out there. As you start to move up the value chain of your products, more focused, higher-quality content sounds like is what you're looking for.
Madeleine Lambert:
Absolutely, and making sure that you're really, really targeting that target audience with your keyword research. Making sure you're spending a lot of time in the planning process. With affiliate marketers, yes, the keyword research is important but you just really need to make sure that you're getting buying keywords right? Whereas, with more targeted stuff, you have to plan a little bit more carefully. Then figure out what social media campaigns would go well with this piece of content, what kind of email blast would do well with this piece of content and with the social media posts. It's a little bit more of a complicated structure when you're looking at clients that have higher ticket items, for sure.
Kyle Gray:
Very cool. We've explored a lot of different areas of hiring contractors, structuring your business with SOPs, creating amazing content. Do you have something maybe closing thought or a closing lesson that something ... Again, we've explored a lot about what a lot of content marketers are missing. But maybe somebody out there who's getting started and really needs to focus somewhere. What's the biggest takeaway that you can give somebody tonight?
Madeleine Lambert:
Oh, that's a great question. I think I'm a huge believer in sitting down and goal-setting. What are your goals for your website, for your business? Then coming up with a plan that is backed up with good data that will drive your decision. Your decisions should be driven by data. Sit down and really invest the time in the planning phases to the keyword research. The content planning is probably the most crucial part of your content creation.
Content planning is the most crucial part of your content creation and should be driven by data
Kyle Gray:
Very powerful stuff, and an absolutely essential. Madeleine, thank you so much. Where can our audience go to learn a little bit more about you? Do you have any cool other resources that maybe you'd wanna share with the audience related to what we've talked about today to help them get started on a lot of the scaling up their content like what you were talking about?
Madeleine Lambert:
Yeah, absolutely. If people wanna find out more about Content Refined, you can visit the website at contentrefined.com. People are always welcome to email me directly at maddie@contentrefined.com. I will always respond. Yes, I guess what I like to offer listeners is if you're on the contentrefined.com, and you're like, "Oh, damn it. These prices are too steep for me at this point in my business. I'd like to focus on creating my own content." We actually have style guides and content writing SOPs that we use internally that I am willing to gift to you guys for taking the time and listening to me today. I can put the link in the show notes with the podcast, coupon code that will allow you to download those SOPs.
Kyle Gray:
You got it. Madeleine, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for sharing those SOPs. Thanks for sharing some of these insights. I totally agree with having goals. I think you're opening story of really having a business that was baby-proof really helped you achieve all of these things that you wanted to achieve. Thank you so much for sharing that with us today, and it's been a pleasure. Let's have you on the show again soon.
Madeleine Lambert:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Kyle Gray:
Thanks for listening to The Story Engine podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes and resources mentioned in this episode, and every episode at thestoryengine.co. If you wanna tell better stories and grow your business with content marketing and copywriting, be sure to download The Content Strategy Template at contentstrategytemplate.com. This template is an essential part of any business that wants to boost their traffic, leads, and sales with content marketing. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.