PODCAST: Are professional services firms missing a trick when it comes to thought leadership?

Editor’s Note: The following podcast is part of an ongoing series offering insight into recent advances in thought leadership approaches, alongside strategic advice and expertise to help professional services stakeholders add value to their firms via proactive content campaigns.

Many firms have begun creating and publishing regular content in order to interact with their audiences, build awareness of their business and generate leads. However, a surprising number of organizations are still not combining SEO with thought leadership and remain in the dark about the benefits of a joint approach between the two disciplines.

In this episode of the podcast, Jamie Obertelli, Infinite Global Digital Strategy Lead, welcomes Kris Jones, CEO of SEO firm LSEO.com, to discuss the role of search engine optimization in successful thought leadership campaigns.

The episode also looks at how many marketing departments are going wrong when it comes to SEO and how firms can maximize the reach of their content with an SEO led approach.

The episode also examines:

• How many marketing departments are going wrong when it comes to SEO and content
• How firms can maximize the reach of their thought leadership with an SEO led approach
• Repurposing content vs creating harmful duplicate content
• The value of SEO spend over short term advertizing spend
• The conflict between PR and SEO

Full transcript: 

Jamie Obertelli: Hello and welcome to the infinite global podcast. Today’s episode is the latest in our series, exploring how professional services firms are upgrading their thought leadership. We’ll also be taking a closer look at the value that new approaches are bringing to forward-thinking businesses. Today, we’re joined by Kris Jones, a serial entrepreneur angel investor, and bestselling author of SEO Visual Blueprint.

Thank you for joining us today, Kris.

Kris Jones: Jamie, it’s great to be here. Thank you.

Jamie Obertelli: For our listeners who might not have come across you before, can you quickly talk through your background and give us a bit of an overview as to what you’re up to these days?

Kris Jones: Yeah, I, I appreciate the opportunity to, you know, share a little bit more about my background.

So the serial entrepreneur piece of my bio, I was an early adopter of digital and the internet back in the late nineties, I was a graduate student at Villanova University in Philadelphia, and just really felt like the internet was going to kind of rewrite business and industry and the way people communicate and retrieve information.

As a grad student, I became an entrepreneur and I’ll sort of fast forward. During the first decade in my career, I built a company called Pepper Jam, which was a leading digital marketing and affiliate network. I built that into one of the largest and most successful tech companies of its time here in the United States. I sold it to eBay in 2009. About a year and a half later, I left the company, founded a investment firm called KBJ capital, where I’ve deployed money as an investor, as an angel investor, but I’ve always had the entrepreneurial sort of spirit and bug. So I’ve invested in about 20, 25 companies. Sevenof those companies I founded or co-founded, and in some cases I’ve run those companies. Most recently, two companies that I have day to day responsibilities are one is called LSEO.com. And that is a leading top five SEO agency in the United States. And then the other one is called Special Guest App. In summary, I’ve been building businesses, I’ve been a strategist,  I’ve been a thought leader and we’re going to get more into that and thats one of the more interesting areas for me to talk about, because I’ve really dedicated my entire career to leveraging platforms like speaking at conferences and getting published in publications, like Fast Company, Inc Magazine and Forbes, to the tune of over 500 publications at this point.

Jamie Obertelli: So the main reason that we asked you here today was to help put an SEO focus on thought leadership, which as I mentioned in the introduction is a topic we’ve been covering in detail throughout this series. We work with a lot of professional services firms that seem to have a very solid handle on the interplay between SEO, the content they put out and how it can give them an edge over their competitors.

But it still feels like a lot of larger firms don’t quite get how thought leadership and SEO can benefit their search rankings, their traffic and ultimately their leads. Is that an issue that you still see and are there any particular sectors or industries that get it more than others?

Kris Jones: Yeah. I mean, I think this is at the heart of an effective SEO strategy for any business from small to enterprise. I think one of the tricky parts of thought leadership is where to get started and then where to spend your time most effectively and we could explore that a little bit later. In December of 2019, Zoom Meeting had about a couple million daily users, about 20 million actually daily user. Fast forward to about 30 days ago, they peeked over 200 million daily users. So there’s been an adoption of digital in a profound way, in a short period of time. And I think when we’re talking about thought leadership, and this is an area that I’ve coached a number of service professionals, I think doctors, particularly pedeatrics, it’s an area that I’ve got some expertise in. I’ve keynoted, a couple of pediatric conferences over the last two years, the national and global ones. And I think that pediatricians have realized and doctors in general, that a lot of moms and dads and others seeking medical advice have turned to things like Amazon, Alexa, Google, and elsewhere. One of the things I’ve coached them on is just them needing to embrace digital. Get in front of a camera, talk about, answer, the most commonly asked questions and become part of the answer and the solution to people looking for answers. And I’ve seen the medical profession really start to embrace thought leadership and coming online and translating what they have in their local communities, in their local offices, into regional and national and in some cases, even global thought leadership position.

From an SEO point of view, thought leadership is one of the most strategic ways of producing content. And when we talk about SEO, it’s interesting, I’ve been doing SEO for over 20 years and so it’s, it’s kind of second nature to me. Sometimes I’ll talk to someone in business that is very experienced, but we’ll start by saying, you know, SEO is not something we know a lot about. And so in summary, what I’ll say to them is that at the end of the day, it’s really about content and it’s about authority. And the two come together when we talk about thought leadership. Thought leadership is a really easy way for businesses to produce authentic, original content on a regular basis, whether that be through print, AKA publishing it on a blog or on a third party website, whether it be through some type of digital mechanism like you and I are doing right now through like digital audio podcasting, doing live streams among other things. So certainly on the same page with you about its importance. And let’s explore a little bit more deeply some of the specific strategies that these folks can use.

Jamie Obertelli: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned the increasing adoption of digital, and I want to ask you a little bit more about that later in detail, especially how COVID-19 has changed people’s behaviors and how people are adapting to that. But even before the coronavirus hit the headlines, people have been predicting that by the end of this year, at some point, we’re going to hit that 50% penetration mark for social media use globally, which is a big deal. Internet users also continue to increase a few months ago. HootSuite research suggested that growth was somewhere close to 8% over the last year. So it makes sense that firms allocate resources to ensuring that thought leadership content has an SEO led approach.

Kris Jones: Yeah. Real quick, before we get to the next question, I think we know I’ve summarized this. I spoke at a national pediatric conference last year in front of over 10,000 people, they were mostly pediatricians, I said two things: I said, number one, standing on the sidelines is no longer an option. And then I said, number too, they need to translate, right. And we can help them with that. I can help them with that, jamie, you and your firm could help them with that, but they need to translate their subject matter expertise, their market position, their brand, all of the things that they’ve enjoyed as part of being a successful business person. But they need to translate that into this new ever evolving world of social media, live streams and lots of other fun tools that I always say, you know, people will say, well, what’s better, you know, Twitter or Tik Tok or this, I’ll say Im somewhat device and network agnostic. I certainly think that we could get into particulars about which one might be more effective for particular industries.

But I, I kind of lead from the standpoint that there will be new tools and new platforms as these business professionals evolve, their thought leadership strategy. So you can’t stand on the sidelines is really the point I wanted to make.

Jamie Obertelli: Absolutely. And as you say, with these new platforms that are emerging, there are countless opportunities to optimize how we appear on those platforms.

From an SEO experts perspective. Is there a magic formula to approaching thought leadership?

Kris Jones: Is there a magic formula? Yeah, there is. It’s to put together a strategy that is consistent and that is deployed over time. Your thought leadership strategy can’t be static, it’s gotta be dynamic. By consistent over time, what I mean is there should be a very clear strategy and how many times a day or a week one is going to put out content, because that’s really what we’re talking about here, and then making that commitment. Being able to make a commitment and stick with it is critical to this strategy. The one other piece that I’ll mention here is in terms of tactics, you want to start by doing an analysis of the universe of topics for answers that you want to respond to over a period of time.  Almost think about it, like putting together a content strategy, where you capture all of these topics. In the SEO space we call them key words, but theyre topics or their answers are keywords and you put this universe of analysis together and then you put your plan of attack together. You prioritize those topics or keywords. Firms like Infinite Global, companies like LSEO and others around the world, we have tools that we could use to analyze, to look at things like search volume and Google trends and a whole number of other things. So it gets a little bit nerdy and a little bit techie, but at the end of the day, I would recommend highly that before the firm kicks off their strategy, or if they just want to jump charge it and get it moving quicker, it’s really a good place to start with a comprehensive analysis. I always get very concerned when I meet with a business professional, whether that be in law or real estate or wherever, and they say they’ve been putting out content digitally for a while, and then I’ll say, well, how are you coming up with the content and they’re like, well, you know, we’re just kind of brainstorming or we’re otherwise taking a laissez faire type of approach to it. I recommend against that. I think that’s kind of equivalent to just growing darts and seeing if they stick instead, I actually think you need to start with a technical approach which is that comprehensive keyword and topical analysis, and then prioritize based on some key metrics that you could associate with those topics.

Jamie Obertelli: I was going to ask you this a little bit later, but you preempted my question when it comes to keywords. One of the things that we find is that sometimes we’ll ask a client, or a potential client, if they have a handle on the keywords that are important to their business before creating content that targets those terms and that firm may have had quite a substantial change in the way it operates over the last few years. As a result, there hasn’t really been much work to reassess whether or not their previously mapped keywords are still relevant. So you’re working towards creating content for keywords that are outdated and you’re not necessarily then showing up in searches the way that you should be, you’re creating the wrong kind of content. So it goes back to not just having a strategy, but also making sure that you renew that strategy on an ongoing basis and you’re constantly checking it to make sure that it’s fit for purpose.

Kris Jones: Yeah, I think you’re right. And in some industries they evolve faster than others so that point that you’re making is even more important in particular industries in the content space. We talk about this idea of evergreen content that basically means putting out content that has an extremely high probability of being important and relevant for many, many years to come. The other type of content, we call it news based content, so it’s trending content that’s important now. And even COVID, let’s hope that next year at this time, it won’t be as important, but if you are advising one of your clients in the medical space to be talking about COVID right now, that would be a really, really good idea to include.

So actually when we help clients put together their content strategy, we really do mix in both evergreen as well as timely news based trending types of content. So, as I said earlier, having been in this industry now for 20 some years, one of the things I learned is that in the SEO space it’s ever evolving so you do have to have a dynamic approach to your strategy. We work with a lot of enterprise and very large clients, and I will say to them, listen, we strongly recommend that you do no less than quarterly audits of your SEO strategy. Even if you have an internal team, and in fact if you have an internal team, you should use an independent third party to put these things together. So my whole philosophy and belief is to have a dynamic strategy where you’re keeping yourself honest. YOu know, SEO, I think where we lose a lot of people that want to self-educate around it, but for whatever, the reason they either become overwhelmed or intimidated, or they think that it requires a lot of in depth training to understand is the technical aspects of SEO that candidly again, become second nature to folks who’ve been in the industry for a long time. But you know, when we start talking about things like indexation, we start talking about things like how to become an answer on Amazon Alexa, it becomes very technical. And so you have to have that dynamic like strategy because what’s hot right now might not be hot later on.

Jamie Obertelli: Are there any examples where you’ve seen thought leadership and SEO work hand in hand really well? Any particular brands that you look at as best in class for their output?

Kris Jones: Wow. That’s a great, great, great question. Let me think this through. It depends if we associate thought leadership with brand development, because then we start getting into influencer marketing and some other topics. I think that the brands that come to mind are those that have very comfortably put their thought leaders in front of a camera didn’t overproduce and just spoke in a way that was relatable. And we’ve seen a lot of that actually over the last several months because of COVID. And I think that that’s really, really good to the extent that there really were no other options. If you even really think about global news right now, particularly television news, you see interviews where they’re being conducted via Skype or via Zoom or one of these other platforms. And so definitely certain brands or certain people that jump out to me. But I think without naming the specifics, I would say that again, that trend that I’m seeing towards authentic content production where experts are stepping up and they’re becoming a resource for their followers and for their customers or whatever else it might be.

Jamie Obertelli: We’re moving towards being more efficient with our content and trying to spread it across as many different channels as possible and to break it up, I always say that, you know, as a society, we’re moving away from this idea of single use plastic and as content creators I feel like we should be moving away from single use content. I don’t even know if that’s a phrase that exists or not yet, but if it doesn’t, I’m claiming it. But does that resonate with you? Do you think you’re doing more with what they already have?

Kris Jones Oh my goodness. Yeah. I think this is a brilliant, brilliant question because when you get into some of these traditional service based industries, legal is a perfect example, they have a lot of content that’s been locked up and so unlocking it and digitizing it has become a strategy. But to your point, this idea of repurposing content. So writing a piece of content that gets published on your blog, you supplement that, or you take some of that content and publish it in the form of video content on YouTube and maybe one of the other video platforms, you push it out through Facebook, through Twitter, et cetera. And you know, if you could coordinate all of that, for instance, I’ll give you a quick example of how an LSEO we’ve been thinking about pushing out our content. And so what we’ll do is we’ll do a podcast. Now remember to get to that podcast topic we did all of the prep and the research prior and I mean the topical analysis, the keyword analysis, et cetera. Once we produce the podcast, we’ll associate it with a sister piece of content that was also written on our blog. ANd very often both the podcast and the blog post, almost always by the way, were related to another piece that I published say on Forbes or on Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land, or one of those. So it’s orchestrated content, it’s repurposed content. Yes. To your point, this idea that, you know, you just put out a 500 or a thousand or 2000 word piece of content and call it a day is not strategic. You need to repurpose that you need to repackage it. If you have a 30 minute video podcast you should have a strategy around bite sizing that to push it out to different platforms. If it’s on Instagram, you know, you’re going to want 60 seconds or less for the regular clip. You could put that on Instagram TV. You may want to push it out on Facebook. So yes, this is the mindset that this quick little conversation we’re having around re-purposing and getting away from the single use strategy really, really could take anybody who’s listening to this could take their content strategy to the next level.

Jamie Obertelli: We like to practice what we preach to our clients, especially when it comes to our own content. So this podcast, for example, will be transcribed. We’ll post it as a blog, we’ll create some audio cut downs for our social media. We could create videos, we could do a few postcards for Twitter, with some quote grabs. So again, it’s one piece of content, but once you put it through that process, you have multiple assets that you can spread across different platforms, which gives you the most reach possible. But it also squeezes every single drop out of the resources that you have available to you and when budgets are being scrutinized across the board, it’s a very, very important approach.

Kris Jones:] One, well, actually two real quick tips. Number one is that YouTube is the second most voluminous search engine in the world next to Google. So more searches are conducted on YouTube than any other platform save Google. And then number two tip, as it relates to SEO, is that a very important onsite SEO factor is time on site. So Google is looking at how people are engaging with your website, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that one of the ways to really drive up time on site is to put really excellent complimentary video content next to very well written, readable, authentic printed content. So that’s a little bit of a secret. So you produce the video with the strategy of supplementing some content that you already have on your website, and by the way, they need not happen at the same time, you could produce a written form piece of content and then retroactively go back and produce some video content, put that video on the site, just embracing the fact that YouTube is really from an SEO point of view, an un-abused resource for people who are thinking about thought leadership.

Jamie Obertelli: Yeah. I think that’s a really important point when you talk about retroactively looking back at old content. A lot of firms create content and I think in their minds, once it’s done and gone out, it’s finished. But there’s a lot of work to be done to mine through existing material, rework it, update it, introduce new elements that will make it more interesting and appealing. The more relevant it is to the new cycle at that moment, the more value it can provide the firm in terms of SEO.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that there’s a massive difference between repurposing content and duplicating content. And I think sometimes that trips people up.  We’re not talking about using the same stuff and just firing it back out, but actually reworking it and making sure it’s appropriate for different audiences and different platforms.

Kris Jones: It’s critical. Duplicate content, with the exception of areas where it’s very difficult to avoid like e-commerce, duplicate content in general in SEO is what I kind of think about as lazy content. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t count. So your content needs to be original and authentic. And that’s it. Now that’s not to say that you can’t take five articles and read those articles and then summarize and put them in your own words. It just means copying and pasting is something that just is a waste of time. It’s lazy and it doesn’t work. And not only that, it can be a primary reason why a website just doesn’t rank. It’s one of those, you know, quote unquote, penalty type of strategies that despite all your other hard work in SEO, if you’ve got duplicate content on your site, you do risk the potential of Google flagging the entire site. Lazy content is bad content,, people shouldn’t be doing it. It just doesn’t check the box.

Jamie Obertelli: I agree. Certainly in the conversations that we’re having with clients, there’s definitely a realization that they need to be creating more content. And by extension, if you’re doing that properly, then there’s an SEO component as well.

Kris Jones: Yeah, it’s extraordinary. And I think that in some cases they won’t even know that they had to embrace. Right. So industries, we all had to globally, we had to embrace platforms that in many cases, people weren’t using. Again, I think the COVID really accelerated the industries that we’re in as being digital. This is a good thing. I think that it’ll be really interesting. Like if you asked me if I’m bearish or bullish about the SEO industry coming out of COVID, I would say that I’m really anxious to see how bullish it’s gonna be, because I think it’s going to be that much more important. You’re going to see that many more businesses around the world know that they must be in the game, that they can’t be on the sidelines and that they need to be investing. In terms of SEO and COVID, I think that because we were forced globally to embrace platforms that many people hadn’t embraced, they didn’t even know that they were putting out content that’s going to have SEO value and longterm value. And if you were to ask me if I’m bearish or bullish, about the future of SEO in light of COVID-19 so many more people coming online and embracing online, in some cases being forced online, kicking and screaming, but they knew they didn’t have a choice. But if you were to ask me I would say that I’m really anxious because I believe that the industry, the SEO industry is going to potentially double or triple short term. And the reason is because those hundreds of millions of people who came online globally and were forced to embrace digital now realize how effective it is, how important it is and any professional recommendation on what the most important digital marketing strategies are, would suggest that SEO is a top one or a top three digital marketing tactic. I was suggesting earlier that I had put together a video of  a podcast, within days after the pandemic really started to close businesses down. I said, listen, many of you are going to cut your ad budgets and I totally get it, you know. I’ve been through economic downturns and you know, we’re going to carefully look at ours. I said, but don’t cut your SEO budget. And if anything, if you have the resources even increase your investment in SEO. Why? The reason why is that an investment in SEO has a longterm cumulative impact on your business. Unlike paid media, which is transactional and if you turn it off the transactions stop, that’s not how SEO works. SEO is cumulative in that as you produce more content, as you build more authority into your website, these types of investments have a cumulative effect over time. And so that’s why during a pandemic like this, it really is a smart place to put your money. And I think coming out of the pandemic, I think it’s going to be overwhelming for a lot of SEO agencies and content marketing agencies to deal with all of the demand for professional expertise to help them along the way.

Jamie Obertelli: You mentioned briefly bad SEO. and that’s a topic that I don’t think is discussed enough. Earlier in my career before I ever worked in digital I was a journalist and then I moved into PR. During my time in PR I noticed there can be quite a bit of tension and some mistrust from PR people and SEO practitioners. I think one of the reasons for that is that PR people tend to be worried that SEO advisors will be chasing keywords in a way that potentially could damage reputation, and we’ve certainly seen that with COVID-19. Initially during the lockdown we saw a lot of firms who are including terms like COVID-19 and Coronavirus and creating content that specifically was targeted around the pandemic, but they didn’t actually have the authority to be engaging in that debate. In a previous podcast in this series, we spoke with a former global comms and engagement leader at E Y and one of the things that he stressed when planning content was first asking whether or not it would be impactful, distinctive, but most importantly, would it be authentic? I’ve certainly seen a lot of content recently that’s made me raise my eyebrows in that regard. Firms should always be asking themselves should we be doing this? And I wonder if that’s something that you agree can be an issue?

Kris Jones: I think that this topic really creates an interesting back and forth and debate at the end of the day I appreciate the antagonism between journalism and SEO  but I look at it a little bit more practically. So I would say in 99% of the times where I’m a consultant, I am really working with businesses who are looking to generate more website, traffic generate more leads, generate more revenue, right? They’re not necessarily trying to shoot for a Pulitzer prize. They’re looking to increase their web traffic. It’s highly practical. It’s highly objective. It’s very KPI driven. So we look at SEO as an industry that has a whole, a range of tactics, we don’t have enough time to go into all of those right now. In any industry there are good actors and there are bad actors. That’s just true. It doesn’t matter, you know, maybe SEO has gotten a bad reputation for one reason or another, but at the end of the day, there are good and bad actors in every industry we’re talking to about thought leadership and thought leadership is really about putting yourself out there. It’s about standing behind your expertise. And so, the idea of white hat, black hat, or good and bad, doesn’t cross my mind much because of just how overt I am as a thought leader myself. And if you really think about thought leadership is about putting yourself at the table, it’s about putting yourself in the game. And so. If you wanted to have a strategy where you’re manipulative or sort of over the top in terms of how aggressive you were with your SEO strategies,  I think that you’re making the wrong decision, but I think you could say that about any industry. So I think generally SEO gets a bad rap because maybe it’s easy to be critical of the industry, but in short, I think like any industry there are good and bad actors and ultimately. I’ve taken pride over a 20 plus year career of being maybe one of the top 100 or so. And I can only say this because I’ve ended up on these lists a lot, you know, the top 100 or so SEO professionals in the world and being on that list, I think most of us would agree that the reputation of SEO being black hat or overly spammy is really just not true when you’re talking about the level of professionalism that this whole podcast is focused on, or that I, and many other successful SEOs have built, you know, multimillion dollar businesses serving enterprise publicly traded companies and others. But it’s out there, Jamie, you know that, I know that there are people out there looking for the short term, pop in traffic and there are ways that you could do that. But based on my professional expertise, those are shortsighted. There are SEO best practices and if you follow them, your business enterprise is likely to generate more website, traffic and be more successful.

Jamie Obertelli: We tend to find that in businesses that operate with a partnership model, boardroom decisions tend to be made by people who are older and maybe have slightly less of a background in digital. As a result it can often be more difficult in selling in these sorts of approaches. Is that something that you see in your experience as well? Do you think there’s a generational shift and as you start getting younger blood into these boards, that firms will naturally progress to a more SEO led approach when they’re looking at thought leadership?

Kris Jones: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re hoping that, I dont know if we’re hoping, but I think my analysis is that the pandemic that we’ve gone through have brought a lot of the people you’re referring to into the digital age, but there’s absolutely no doubt that as you move up the rankings in organizations, and there’s also sort of an age bias as you are interacting with people 50 or 60 years and older, who didn’t grow up around digital becomes a bit of a more difficult sell. So what I do and I actually have, and a bit of experience working directly with C suite executives, helping them think through the importance of SEO, what I do is I put it in terms that they understand. Right. So, you know, any successful business has three primary drivers of its success, its balance sheet, its cashflow statement or position and its profit and loss statement. And so any business, I don’t care what industry, if you have a bad balance sheet, if you have bad debt, I could have those conversations with them and relate SEO to those particular key key aspects of successfully managing a business. And so that would be my recommendation, you know, so for any other agency owners or SEOs that are out there, I would recommend that they think about how to relate the industry to the key drivers of success or failure in any given business and, you know, stop using the more technical terms. I also think, this is just my own personal bias this isn’t right or wrogg, this is just an opinion, but a lot of SEOs are theoretical and not practical. I’m a practical SEO. I’m sort of like, we need to baseline where you’re at right now., we need to measure it on a monthly basis and we need to have a candid conversation about if we’re seeing increases or decreases. If we’re seeing increases, we should stay the course. If we’re seeing decreases, oh my God, what’s going on? We’ve got to take action. And so those types of conversations, really any C suite executive is going to be able to relate to that practical considerations of SEO. Whereas the theoretical one where, you know, we start getting in well, you know, the Penguin and the Panda updates, this or that, I’ve seen SEOs lose a lot of business by getting too hypothetical or too theoretical. Their ability to bring it back home to practical considerations, usually results in a longterm relationship. In the case of LSEO, our largest clients have been with us for many, many years, because we were able to convince them of the buy-in, but it wasn’t theoretical. We said to them, Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to measure it. Here’s how we’re going to report on it. And we take a performance SEO position here. So you should expect to see your traffic and your key performance indicators grow consistently over time. And so that’s my advice. And I guess it’s harder to have that perspective. If someone who’s listening here has only been maybe in the industry for a couple of years, but that reflection that I just shared really comes from quite a bit of examples, where I was able to really connect with senior people at organizations by not trying to school them on SEO theory.

Jamie Obertelli: Are there any questions that I haven’t asked you about in terms of the way that thought leadership and SEO should be interacting? Any trends that we should be looking at?

Kris Jones: Well, yeah. You know, one thing that I referenced in, like the first question was this idea of how to get started. That’s one of the most popular questions I get. People will find out like, Oh my God, you’ve been published over 500 times and how in the world do you do that? That’s like how many times a week, how many times a month, for how many years? I’ve accumulated those publications over a number of years now, when I first got started, it was really written blog content, you know, and I would start to write my own content and then I would do some outreach or look for resources in my industry that took third party content. But I do think that there is somewhat of a responsibility to make sure that you have the proper editorial, the proper structure to the content that you’re producing, if it’s written. But what I was saying was that now 2020, you have this opportunity to produce content in a lot of different ways, you know, short form, video, long form video, audio, there’s ways of doing short form.

Written content, long-form written content. Where do I get started? It’s usually your blog or content that you easily could produce in control. Yeah, you take interviews like I did here with you Jamie, I see it as opportunities as extending my thought leadership, building up my reputation and it really candidly makes it that much easier for me to continue to get additional opportunities. And so those are my recommendations with regard to SEO and thought leadership and how folks can get started right away.

Jamie Obertelli: I always tell clients it’s a bit like fishing, The more hooks you have in the water, the more chance you actually have of landing a big fish.

Kris Jones: Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is also is I think when I first started to produce content, I just assumed that not a lot of people would read it or watch it or listen to it. And then what’s amazed me is just how unexpectedly successful you can become as a thought leader by just producing the content. Producing good content. Because to your point, opportunities will come where your subject matter expertise and your thought leadership could get expressed to very, very large audiences and have a really big influence. It’s absolutely worth making an investment of resources in terms of thought leadership. A lot of those resources have to do with your precious time. But as a return on time, instead of return on investment, I think that spending your time on thought leadership consistently over time is one of the better investments that someone could make.

Jamie Obertelli: It’s been great having you on today Kris, thank you for joining us and thank you for sharing your perspective.

Kris Jones: Thanks, Jamie. Really appreciate it. Great to be here. Thank you.

Jamie Obertelli: You’ve been listening to a special podcast from infinite global for more information about us and the work we do visit www.Infinite global. com. You can also subscribe to the podcast via Apple podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher for regular updates and future episodes.