Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey, Gorgeous! This is episode number 237 with the amazing Lacy Boggs.

Lacy Boggs [0:07]
Hi, this is Lacy Boggs and you’re listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy.

Christine Schlonski [0:13]
Well, I’m really looking forward to an amazing conversation with Lacy Boggs today, we are going to talk about only bloggers strategy. Oftentimes and you probably can relate. We just put something out there because we feel inspired to and that’s all cool. But Lacy’s going to teach us what we can do if we are not feeling inspired by our amazing content. Lacy is a content strategist. She is the author of the best selling Kindle book, Make a Killing with Content, and she is the Director of the Content Direction Agency. She helps personality-driven brands create and implement content marketing strategies, tailor-made to support the customers, and reach their goals. So have fun with this amazing episode. Well, I am so excited you are on the show today, Lacy. Welcome!

Lacy Boggs [1:07]
Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Christine Schlonski [1:10]
Yeah. And it’s so funny. We kind of met through a mutual friend. And I was invited to one of your webinars, and I loved it so much how it was done the content you shared, that I had to invite you to Heart Sells! Podcast. So I’m so happy you’re here. You know, I mean, I mean, you are a content strategist. Can you let us in like, what’s a content strategist? And why is this so important for entrepreneurs?

Lacy Boggs [1:41]
Sure. So I started out as a copywriter and, and more specifically, I started out as a ghost blogger, so I was blogging for other people’s small businesses, and that’s still what we do. That’s still the bread and butter of what we do. But as I was getting more clients when I first started this business, I thought when I started that they were just hiring me to write the words. And then they started asking questions like, what do you think I should write about? How can I get more leads out of this blog? How can I make more sales? And I didn’t know the answers at the time. So I took it upon myself to educate myself, do a lot of marketing courses, learn about content marketing. And as I did that, I discovered I had some very strong opinions about it. I had some things I agreed with, and some things I didn’t agree with. And so over time, I developed my own system, of course, and so now, I try to help our clients and my audience in general, understand that there’s no need to blog unless you have a strategy, right? Because otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and probably your audience’s time too, because we’ve reached this point of sort of peak content. I don’t care how specific and focus your industry is, or your niche is, there’s more content in that niche than anybody could consume. And so in order to stand out, we have to get strategic about what are we saying? Who are we talking to? And how is that creating a conversation with our client that will lead to a sale? So that’s what a content strategist does. I help create that big picture, 30,000-foot view of the content, you’re putting out everything, from your tweets, to your emails, to your sales sequences, should be part of that strategy. So that, you know, you’re not wasting your time when you’re creating content.

Christine Schlonski [3:30]
Yeah, and it’s so important. And I can also, like, here people think, like, oh, but I want to follow my heart. I just want to put up, and you know, I mean, I do that, but I’m inspired to write a blog and I haven’t blogged for quite a while this definitely needs to change. But I used to blog, like, every day, and you know, just whatever came through I posted about I always had a call to action because I knew, you know, you want to make some offers, you want to invite people to work with you. And so I did something and then at the end, I had a call to action. But it’s like when you talk strategy, it often feels like rigid. Like, oh my goodness, this is overwhelming, like, do I need a marketing calendar? How does it help? I’m a solopreneur. I, you know, or I have just somebody working with me part-time supporting my business. Like, what can you tell those people because you’ve, you’ve seen it all. How, how is this making a difference when they do get a little bit more strategic?

Lacy Boggs [4:41]
Yeah. So I do hear that a lot. Like I want to write when I feel inspired, and I say, That’s awesome. You should do that. And what happens when you don’t feel inspired? But what happens when you have a dry spell? What happens when I call it page fright when you get page fright and you don’t know what to write? I think a strategy helps provide the framework so that you’re never starting totally from scratch, right? You’re never looking at a totally blank page, or blank blog, post, whatever. You have something to fall back on, you have something like, Okay, I know what my intention is with this post. I know what I need to do to reach my goals. And then you can write about whatever topic moves your heart in that moment, that’s going to help move you towards those goals, right? I like the metaphor of a poet. When we think about poets, not everybody writes in free verse write a lot of people write sonnets or they write haikus or whatever it is, limericks, even I don’t care. But there’s a very firm structure around what a sonnet is. Now, does that make the poet any less creative when they’re following that structure? No, I might even argue that it makes them more creative because they have to fit it in that framework. So you know, sometimes when we’re doing strategies, we get right down to the, what topic are you going to write about each week? And other times, it’s more like, I’m not going to pick the topic for you, you can feel your feelings that day. But you know what to do with it, like this post needs to generate desire for the next thing you’re selling. And then you can go from there. So that’s kind of my word to my inspiration, folks.

Christine Schlonski [6:25]
And so when you say, well, this post needs to create a desire for the next thing you’re selling, people actually should kind of have an idea what they want to put out when right? And I know that in early stages of business, so many people, you know, and this includes me just, just winging it, right? But then after a while, you kind of figure out well this is not sustainable. It’s way too much work. If you keep winging it all the time, you need to create a structure to give you more freedom. And so that’s, that’s so so super important. So when, when did you figure out that this structure is helping your business? Because you’re very creative, you have a very creative background. And, you know, you shared with me that in your free time you write to, uh, you love to write fantasy novels. So how does that go along with, you know, figuring out like, what kind of strategy is required for your business to move forward?

Lacy Boggs [7:34]
Yeah, it’s such a good question. I think what, like the Aha! moment for me was when I realized that many of my clients and sometimes myself too, we weren’t clear on what the end goal was, right? We were told at some point you have to have a blog or you should start a podcast or maybe you should do video or you need an email newsletter, but other than like, okay, start an email newsletter. We weren’t thinking about what the end goal was. And what I realized was that when I actually teased this out with people when we were talking about strategy, and I say, well, what’s your business goal right now? They would get a lot more specific. And they’d say, well, I need to grow my list so that I have enough people to sell my next thing, where I really need to make sure I’m reaching this type of person so that I can fill my next retreat, or I really want to sell a book. So I want to be a thought leader. And I want to get lots of people following me on Facebook so the publisher will think I’m a big deal. All of those things are worthy goals. And all of them have a slightly different path to achieve them. So once I started asking my clients about, like, tell me your big goal, what’s your, what’s the point behind all of this? It became about a lot more than just this one blog post, right? You can kind of see once you zoom out a little, you can see how the, all the puzzle pieces fit together in a different way. So then that helps people, even people who want to write when the inspiration strikes, they can see like, oh, but if I start now, with the list building, then I will have an easier time when I’m ready to launch because I’ll be able to nurture that, right? And so then it becomes like, oh, I get it, I see why this is valuable. I understand why the strategy needs to happen. And it just fills in so many of those gaps. Like we get to, for example, when you’re new, sometimes you get to a launch. And you have a goal that you just pick out of the air, I’m going to sell 50 spots. Okay, great. Well, do you have enough people on your list to sell 50 spots? And then if you don’t hit 50, we feel really bad. Like I’ve done this myself, right? You feel really bad. But if you go back and run the numbers, you’re like, oh, I actually converted really well and a good percentage. I just didn’t have enough people in my audience to hit that 50, right? So if we take half a step back, think about those numbers. Think about those over, overall goals. Then the content can actually serve a purpose of moving us towards those goals helping us achieve those goals, even when the goal has nothing to do with the blog post.

Christine Schlonski [10:09]
Yeah, totally, totally agree. And what’s beautiful about it, it, it helps you to increase your impact. Mm-hmm. Right? It’s not just I mean, we talked a lot about, you know, getting your goal, but what’s the goal behind the goal? Obviously, it’s that you can stay in business, which is super important. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to share your message and your beautiful gifts. But it’s also like the impact. Obviously, if you would have had 50 people in the course, you would have had impacted 50 lives, right? And if you don’t have the impact, well, obviously you make less money. And at the same time, you have less impact, I think, opening up to the possibility that you can grow all the time if you do it a little bit more strategically. That’s really, really important.

Lacy Boggs [11:04]
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And I feel like there’s also a lot of times people feel like they’re just blogging into the void like they put out a message, but nobody sees, it feels like nobody sees it, or nobody’s reading it. And we can be more strategic about that, too, right? We can be more strategic about how are we promoting? How are we spending our energy? Is it better to spend our energy writing one really excellent post and then the rest of the month promoting it, rather than trying to turn one up every week? Or three times a week or whatever? I think we can get more strategic about that as well.

Christine Schlonski [11:44]
Yeah, and I’m just fitting in nodding my head obviously the audience can’t see that. But what an idea, right? Write a really good post and promote the post instead of writing a post every day.

Lacy Boggs [11:58]
You know, if you’ve got if you’re, if you’ve set your goal in, and you’ve got this audience that comes back every single day and can’t wait to see what new words of wisdom you’re dropping, then, by all means, do that. But if you’re like the rest of us mere mortals, it’s sometimes a better strategy to say I’m actually, going to spend more time pouring my heart and soul into a one, really great piece of content. And then spend the time I would have spent writing more actually getting it out there so more people see it, so that as you were saying so that it impacts more people.

Christine Schlonski [12:32]
Yeah. And do you have some advice you can share on that? Like, how do I promote it? I put it on Facebook. I maybe I put it on LinkedIn. And I put a nice picture on Instagram and I share the links. Like, what can I do to make it easier and to get people’s attention?

Lacy Boggs [12:49]
Yeah, that’s a great question because when we share too, so we all have sort of the standard promotion that we probably do, right? So we share it on our Facebook. We share it to her Instagram. Whatever that is, we share it probably with our lists, send out an email. That’s sort of your standard promotion. But what that does is that gets it to people who already know you write it, that gets it to your inner circle people who are already aware of you. And so when we, when the goal is to build the platform or to generate more leads, or that kind of thing, we have to get outside of that bubble to people who don’t know about us yet. So when you think about it that way, you start to think, okay, well, what can I do to get this in front of new people, new eyeballs, so, you know, syndicating it as an article on LinkedIn can actually, get it to more people syndicating it to someplace like medium can get it in front of new people. But then beyond that, I always like to think of borrowing somebody else’s stage. So who do you know, that reaches a similar audience but isn’t a direct competitor? And would they be willing to share your work once in a while, right? I often have my clients make a list. We call it hotlist have between 20 and 50 people that they know even just a little bit, could reach a similar audience. And then every week or however often they’re writing a post, they’ll send out a few emails and say; Hey, Christine, I wrote this really great blog post this week. And I think it would resonate with your audience. And here’s why would you mind sharing it? Here’s a link and a blurb you can copy the worst they can say is no or say nothing, right? And the best that can happen is that they’ll share it. A lot of times, especially when we’re, we have a social media platform. We’re looking for great content to share, right? So it’s not an audacious ask to send something that we’ve put thought into like I would think about, okay, this is a really good fit for Christine because X Y Z and then ask you to share it, right? It’s not just like I’m spamming everybody I know. But then that helps get it outside of my circle and start to get some new people seeing it that hopefully, we come in. Obviously, you can do the same thing with paid advertising, but a lot of people want to focus on organic. So one other thing you can do is focus on your SEO so that when people are googling for a specific question, your post comes up as an answer. Now, if you’re in a really competitive niche, that can be difficult, like weight loss, very, very competitive, very difficult. But, you know, we work with an SEO guru on my team, who helps us figure out what some of those longer tail keywords are specific questions, people are googling so that there’s less competition and we have a better chance of showing up directly for the person who’s looking for the solution to the problem we solve.

Christine Schlonski [15:43]
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s, SEO is such an interesting topic.

Lacy Boggs [15:49]
That’s a whole other, that’s a whole other podcast.

Christine Schlonski [15:52]
That, yeah. And that’s yeah, I had Steven Spencer who is one of the SEO Guru so to speak. Yeah, I had him on my last Virtual Summit, The Heart-Centered Lead Generation Summit sharing some of his wisdom. And I mean, this can be like super, super strategical scientific work. So it’s not really for the creative mind. And a thing, every creative kind of gets a chance to outsource.

Lacy Boggs [16:26]
Totally true. And when Meg and I tried to put together an editorial calendar for somebody like that, we try to make it as easy as humanly possible, because you don’t have to be an expert in SEO to benefit from it, right?

Christine Schlonski [16:41]
Yes, you don’t. And that that was actually I’m just going to pick that up because that’s like the magic word Editorial Calendar. And you brought us your Editorial Calendar Template as a gift which I’m super grateful for, and people can get that in The Show Notes and the Resource section. And as well as going to your link, but tell us about it and tell us where people can find it?

Lacy Boggs [17:09]
Yes. So it’s actually, I’ve put together a whole dashboard for you guys. So the first time it’s in Google Sheets, so all you do is click on it and make a copy. And then it’s your own and you can do whatever you like with it. But the first tab is your editorial calendar. And I like to do it in a spreadsheet because it helps me see things all on one page. You know, sometimes we put things in a calendar, like if you imagine Google Calendar, this is like the monthly or yearly view, right? So you can see everything happening at once. And I like to start with what’s going on in your business. You know, what are you selling? What are you promoting? When are you going to be speaking somewhere that you want to promote things like that, and then narrow it down from there and we always again, start with the goal in mind and work backward. And then the other tabs in there are all about metrics because how do we know If we’re reaching our goals if we’re not tracking anything, right? So I’ve tried to make it as newbie-friendly as possible, but to help you figure out which metrics are most important for your business and your content marketing, and then have a really easy way to track them.

Christine Schlonski [18:17]
Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so so much. And please tell us where, where people can get it if they haven’t read it right now, but obviously, they can also go to the Show Notes.

Lacy Boggs [18:27]
Yeah, so it’s going to be at lacyboggs.com/heart-sells.

Christine Schlonski [18:33]
Awesome. Well, thank you so so much. And I want to finish with another fun fact about you because I know that so many people have actually the fear of speaking in public, right? And they are creative, but they’re not really putting themselves out there. But I think you are even taking it a level further. But actually singing, tell us a little bit about that.

Lacy Boggs [19:05]
Yes, I am. Well, this is so funny because so I’ve been classically trained as a singer. I had 12 years of voice lessons in school. I did it through college, but I knew even back then I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. You know, I’d never had the goal of being the next pop star being on American Idol, nothing like that, right? I just enjoy it so much. And so then, you know, life happens. You get busy, I had a baby. I started a business. And I just recently within the last two or three years, found a community choir here in Colorado. And I joined and it has been the best thing for me, it has been the best self-care I have done for myself in a while. But yes, we are singing at Carnegie Hall at the end of March, which I’m so excited about.

Christine Schlonski [19:56]
Yeah. So excited for you. I mean that’s big, right? So, yeah.

Lacy Boggs [20:03]
It’s huge! We did. We did Red Rocks Amphitheatre last year. So if people are familiar with Colorado, it’s a big beautiful, natural amphitheater that lots of big name bands have played. So we got to, I got to sing on stage at Red Rocks last year and this dream to me kind of came off.

Christine Schlonski [20:22]
Wow, talk about up-leveling.

Lacy Boggs [20:24]
Yeah. Where do I go from here? I don’t even know.

Christine Schlonski [20:28]
Well, the world has some more stages. Don’t you think? We thank you so much, Lacy, for this wonderful conversation. And I can’t wait to have you back on the show with the next interview.

Lacy Boggs [20:43]
I’m so excited. Thank you for having me.

Christine Schlonski [20:46]
Well, I had a lot of fun with this episode and hope you had as well I learned a ton, especially the Aha! moment I had was if you don’t feel like writing a blog, promote a blog that you have already written, duh? So if you had the same Aha! moment, I would just love to know, reach out to info@hristineschlonski.com. And leave me a message, share with me, where are you stuck with your content strategy? What do you do? What kind of tweaks do you have? And if I really, really like it, what you’re writing, I’m really happy to share on a Variety Friday and give you a shout out, because you have had the audacity to reach out and to share what you are doing.

Christine Schlonski [21:36]
So I hope you had a lot of fun. Hop on over to christineshlonski.com. Find the podcast tab. And there you have the show notes, the transcripts, all the resources to the amazing Lacy Boggs. And once you’re over there, make also sure you Sign up for the Empowerment Notes. That’s Empowerment right into your inbox. And that’s actually on a very regular base because at least once a week I do feel inspired to write something that I usually do not share on social media. So you will be the first one to know and you will get all the amazing updates for Heart Sells! Podcast. Thank you so much for having been here. And make sure you catch the next episode that is going to come out soon. Have a wonderful day. And enjoy wherever you are in this beautiful world.