“Carpenters aren’t scared of nail guns. It can replace the hammer but, it can’t replace the carpenter. I think that is what AI is and represents.”

Dave Snyder is the CEO of CopyPress. His background in SEO, social media, and content marketing led Dave to look for a better way to scale and create content. That search led to the formation of CopyPress.

Today, CopyPress is one the most trusted content providers online working with brands like Linkedin, Zenefits, Sears, Macy’s, IHG, and Stitchfix. With help from CopyPress, clients are able to increase their organic web traffic, improve their search engine rankings, and build their brand awareness.

Questions and topics we covered include:

• Dave’s story from how he transitioned from teacher to getting his first SEO job.
• The story of how is first agency merged with Search Engine Journal (it was called Search and Social).
• How he kicked off CopyPress and when he began to see the early signs of success.
• How to keep a long-term relationship with your clients?
• Why should content marketers care about AI?
• What is your sales strategy, how are you getting consistently big clients?
• What can they do now to prepare for future changes in the craft?
• Why should content marketers care just as much about attribution as they care about the content they are making?
• Why should all marketers study sales letters?
• How should companies build a blog in 2022?
• How can content marketers find the right balance between creating content people want to read and creating content that ranks on search?

Full Episode Transcript:

Kenny Soto 0:01  

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the people of digital marketing with your host, Kenny Soto, and today’s special guest, Dave Schneider. Hi, Dave, how are you?

 

Dave Snyder 0:22  

Hey, Kenny, how’s it going today?

 

Kenny Soto 0:24  

I’m doing very well. And for the most part, it’s, it’s been a good week, to say the least. And before we dive into content marketing, which you’re an expert in, and copywriting, I wanted to give the audience more context into us professionally and as a marketer. It’s a question that I usually ask at the beginning of every episode because it’s very straightforward. So without further ado, how did you get into digital marketing?

 

Dave Snyder 0:55  

Yeah, it’s convoluted, it’s a bit of a story. So I’ll try to go through it quickly. I have a degree in creative writing from Florida State University. This was not a well-thought-out path in my college time. Because it turns out, you really can’t make money from a degree in creative writing. So when I got out of school, I needed to do something. 

 

I became a middle school teacher for three years. During my process of teaching, I started because you don’t make much money as a teacher and I had a young family who started trying to figure out how to make money online. I actually started writing, doing sports writing for fantasy sports sites. I mean, this was back in the day, and I was getting paid like, less than a penny a word. 

 

During that time, I started my own sports blog. It’s just started doing stuff online. So then I got to summer as a teacher, and I was burnt out and I wanted to find something different to do. And I honestly just started trying to find a job, doing copywriting for an online agency of some kind, and put my resume out there. And I had all my resumes put down, and I had some SEO skills because I had done my blog, right? So I thought I knew SEO, but this agency got a hold of my resume and was like, oh, you know, you know, SEO? I was like, Yeah, sure. I know, SEO. So I kind of hacked my way into my first agency job. 

 

But I just really picked up on SEO specifically really quickly. You know, my brain just faces like a puzzle, right? And so besides that, it also means, as we know, SEO is a ton of writing and being creative. And so, you know, within six months of that agency job, I had landed an in-house gig and I started the first agency I owned within a year of that experience and just started speaking. I’ve gone to conferences and different things like that, and again, just I took to it quickly. I’m an autodidact. So I taught myself really quickly. But yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting story. I mean, from the time I graduated from school till about four or five years later, I went from being a teacher to conning my way into an SEO job to owning an SEO agency, myself.

 

Kenny Soto 3:12  

Before we talk about your SEO agency, I want to know, what competitive advantage do you think you get as a marketer? From your teaching experience?

 

Dave Snyder 3:23  

Yeah, I think it’s really helped me understand how that messaging has to be presented in different ways for different people, right? So I talk a lot about using the whole buffalo when doing content marketing, this concept that, you know, like you’re doing right now you’re doing a podcast that you’re doing a video for that you might also get a transcript for, and put it as a blog post somewhere, right? And this concept that like, not every learner learns things the same way or ingests content inherently the same way. 

 

And so being able to talk to several of those different personas, right? I mean, it’s still something that’s underserved in the Persona creation process, we think about personas just as who they are, what they buy, not how they think, how they, you know, take those concepts and put them into play. So I think that’s really helped me. I also think, as a business owner, and someone that has, you know, again, spoken and tried to do some thought leadership, still having that love for teaching people and how that relates to how I’ve helped with employees kind of develop over time as well.

 

Kenny Soto 4:35  

Can you tell us the story of how you got copy press started? You did allude to it a little bit. Can you give us a bigger picture?

 

Dave Snyder 4:43  

Actually, that first agency wasn’t even copy-pressed. So this is another great story. My first agency was just me and another young guy at the time. We were young, not young anymore, but we started a company called Search Social, a very creative name. Certainly when we did, we did a search and social. And so we did that for about a year. I mean, the agency went on past that. But we ended up merging our business with Lauren Baker who owns Search Engine Journal. 

 

So I was the owner of Search Engine Journal at one point search and social. So about two years after the start of our agency, we were a multimillion-dollar agency. Then we made the brilliant move to merge with some other companies, we started a company called BlueGlass. Then that company had a lot of problems from the very start. 

 

I saw the copy press was actually a product we were developing within that company, I saw some issues that I was like. Alright, I broke the copy, pressed out of the blue glass entity and eventually started this, I sold my shares. blue glass went bankrupt, about six months later, and copy press proper was kind of born from that, again, a very swift timeline, right? We’re talking about starting my agency, merging it, merging again in another year, and then selling out my shares and starting copy press, and this was all around 2011. So we’re talking almost 11 years ago, at this point. But since that time, copy press has been the main business,

 

Kenny Soto 6:22  

There is a percentage of listeners who are either thinking about or have already started trying to build their own business that could be product based, but most likely because of their line of work, they’re in IT service-based, marketing related, etc. How do you know you started to see some success with copy brushes?

 

Dave Snyder 6:48  

I mean, you start to be able to pay yourself. Like that’s, that’s the number one thing. Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing is, I mean, the real, the real thing that you’ll start to notice is referrals, man, like, people start referring business to you, you know that you’ve got something good? If you’re not getting those referrals, yet. 

 

It’s something to ask yourself a question, why am I not doing a good enough job? Why people are referring me to the next person, right? Because people love to give referrals like if you know, if you have a really great product, you want people to be like, Oh, Kenny sent me that product. That’s awesome. Thank God, Kenny was there for that, like, people love to do that. So why aren’t they referring you? I think that that’s a critical piece of it.

 

Kenny Soto 7:33  

Are referrals, your main acquisition channel? Well, how else? Are you getting clients?

 

Dave Snyder 7:40  

Yeah, I mean, you know, I’ve been around a long time. So I have a pretty strong network. That’s always been good. But yet referrals are copied presses number one methodology, which again, takes a long time, right? It’s a flywheel, it takes a while to spin. It’s kind of like the cart in the horse situation as well, right, you need to get that first customer, and that’s awesome to then refer you to the next customer. 

 

That’s awesome. But as of today, I would say referrals. The other thing we see a lot in our space is, you know, you make a contact at one company or agency. And then invariably those people move to other things, and they take you with them. If you’re really good. Do you know what I mean? What I will tell people listening to this, is no matter if you’re starting your own agency, or you’re in-house somewhere, people don’t forget how you treat them in this industry. And so there are two ways for that to go. 

 

One, you could be, you know, taking your hot stuff and treating people poorly. That will leave a mark. Or you can just do right by people. And I think what I have done over the years, you know, I’m not the smartest guy in the room, but people trust me because I don’t screw people over. And you know, again, the good reputation spreads just as much as the bad reputation.

 

Kenny Soto 9:00  

Yeah. With so many marketers online, focusing on their online persona, they might be forgetting that. I don’t really

 

Dave Snyder 9:10  

See a lot of people. Yeah, you see a lot of people go toward this persona. Is this your work? Like I’m making lots of money. I mean, I used to be there when I was really young, I look back at it where early on I’m like crushing the world, you know, doing all this. People, people don’t really want to feel like you’re one of their conquests. Do you know what I mean? Like, they’re just another number for you. People want to be able to trust you and know like, Hey, you’re in this for the long haul with me and you’re invested in this?

 

Kenny Soto 9:39  

Well, let me ask a personal question. I know certain listeners will also resonate with this one. How do you go about sustaining a long relationship with a client?

 

Dave Snyder 9:51  

Yeah, again, I think a lot of it comes down to being very transparent and honest. Right. So one thing I’m really good at and I think people who are newer in the space will feel a need. Sometimes when somebody asks you can you do something? They’ll say yes, even though it might not be a specialty for them. I know I used to feel that weight of like I just say, yeah, we’ll figure it out later. But transparency goes a long way with people, you know what I mean? And like the ability to just be like, I can’t do this, or, Hey, this shouldn’t be done this way. 

 

That builds up trust in how people will perceive you and interact with you, right? Because the other route where you can’t fulfill what you’ve told somebody you can do, that’s going to sour that relationship very, very quickly. So yeah, I mean, even on my sales calls, where I have sales calls, like, it’s very much consultative, it’s about building trust. It’s about being transparent, like, I’m part of my sales calls, going through what copy press doesn’t do well. Like there’s not a lot of people that do sales calls like that, where they’re like, Hey, let me point out what we don’t do well. But I think that’s important. I think it’s important for people to get a full perspective on it.

 

Kenny Soto 11:07  

Let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about content marketing. There are a ton of martech tools coming out this year. And they were coming out last year as well, where they’re using some form of AI to create content. Why should content marketers care about AI?

 

Dave Snyder 11:26  

Yeah, I think content marketers should care about AI. But what I want to be clear about, and I actually did a webinar on this recently, is that AI is not going to replace copywriters, yet that’s becoming increasingly obvious. And part of my thesis on that is that whenever you see these AI tools marketed, they always say, it’s hard, hard to tell the difference between AI content and human content. That’s the barrier to their quality metric. It’s never that the AI content is just really good. Right? It’s just it’s, it’s almost like humans, and so like that’s, we’re talking about it being okay, cool AI content vendors on the level of our worst human copywriters, right, which isn’t what anybody wants in their marketing campaign anymore. 

 

So I think what AI content represents though, is a great tool for copywriters, and content marketers to be able to do things like research really quickly, to do a B testing on different types of copy. If you’re an ad, if you’re in the ad space, the ability to redo headlines and multiple ways, right and redo body copy of ads, that’s where AI excels where humans, from a labor perspective, are just too expensive. I think that’s what it is. So I think I honestly think we’re so early on with it because people haven’t fully realized how it should be utilized. There are some companies out there that are doing content, and brief creation, I think that’s a really good idea. 

 

There are companies out there that are doing Hey, like, we’re gonna do the full creation of the content. I think that’s a really bad idea. Right? You have to remember, like, we’ve always had bad copywriters. There was a full Google algorithm update called panda built around destroying that model. And now we’ve always had what has been called article spinners, right, like computer programs that spin out content. These are just better versions of that, for sure. But Google doesn’t want it. It’s not going to be good content. 

 

A computer can’t emote, it can’t understand emotions, and why it should write something compelling. It also can’t create new ideas, it can only take other ideas and reuse them. And so that’s why I think you know, good sales copy. Good marketing copy is going to have to come from a human, but I don’t think writers should be as scared of AI as they are. I think it’s going to be an awesome tool for us. You know, things like Grammarly are great examples of really good spell-checking and grammar tools. That’s all AI. Those are great tools.

 

Kenny Soto 14:16  

So it’s not necessarily focusing on fear of being replaced but more so these are new tools that make my work scalable.

 

Dave Snyder 14:26  

100% It’s yeah, embracing that concept, right like carpenters aren’t scared of nail guns. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s just a way to like it’s not replacing your hammer but it can’t replace the carpenter. You know, I think that’s what AI is and represents and that’s the way we’re looking at a copy press like how can we continually include these tools into our back-end software to make writers’ lives better? 

 

Hey, writer, you can make more money now because you don’t have to do all the research the AI can do the rest Search for you. These are good things, right? But I do think it’s funny because the markets are not even looking at it this way yet. It’s very much still like a copywriter versus AI kind of concept. 

 

Kenny Soto 15:13  

So let’s not even focus on AI. Are there any other developments today, tools, or resources that are changing the way content marketing and copywriting are going to be done in the future outside of AI?

 

Dave Snyder 15:29  

Yeah, I mean, I think just the way we consume content man, like, tic TOCs, the worst thing that’s ever happened to humanity, I believe, like, and I take, I say this as someone like, I’ve been watching YouTube a lot lately, and now they have YouTube shorts. And at first, I was like, I don’t understand what this is. And I find myself mind-numbingly scrolling through that nonsense. 

 

And so I think, you know, from a marketing standpoint, I mean, it all scares me because it’s like, so what I’ve got to eventually figure out how to do messaging within 10 seconds, and have somebody’s attention and then get them were, right? Like, if you’re a b2b marketer, how do you play in that space? You’re not going to do anything on TikTok, but everybody’s attention spans continue to dwindle? So I think, conceptually, it’s understanding like, Yeah, I mean, what is the future of content, we continue down this rabbit hole, that we’re kind of going down now. 

 

But you know, what, let me also balance that with at the same time that you have tick tock, you also have stuff like substack coming out, right? People are writing MIDI newsletters or Patreon. So I mean, you know, let me not all doom and gloom it, but I think those the substack. And Patreon is really interesting from a marketing perspective, something I’ve talked about for years, like brands, should be building their own platforms, and not worrying about getting on other publications. Like there are people willing to pay other people for their content. 

 

So why as a brand, wouldn’t you be creating content to bring people to it? Right, like companies like Red Bull have been doing this for years realizing like, Yeah, I mean, we’re spending money elsewhere on ads and whatnot, why shouldn’t we own the platform? So I think, you know, on one side, we’ve got decreasing a 10. Attention spans, how do we, how do we adjust to that? On the other side, I think owning your brand, being the influencer for brands, you know what I mean, not relying on third-party platforms and influencers.

 

Kenny Soto 17:36  

Let’s have some fun here. YouTube short scares you. Is there anything else that scares you?

 

Dave Snyder 17:42  

Snakes, dogs in marketing? Yeah, snakes scare me. Generally, they scare me. I live in Florida, and they’re all over the place.

 

Kenny Soto 17:50  

Now, let me think about marketing holistically. And let’s tie it back to your business. Are there any notable challenges that you’re facing as a marketer, or as a business leader, that you think listeners might learn from?

 

Dave Snyder 18:08  

I don’t know if you want to take a break for a second. Let me try to call them out.

 

Kenny Soto 18:13  

No worries, take your time.

 

Dave Snyder 18:17  

No, no, no, no. I brought the big one. And with me, I’m just gonna make it worse and better. Alright, so what was the question?

 

Kenny Soto 18:42  

The question was when we think about marketing holistically, and this can be as a marketer, or just as a business owner, what challenges are you facing this year that you think might lead to some lessons for the listeners?

 

Dave Snyder 18:58  

Yeah, I mean, I think you know, I think right now, young marketers are being faced with the idea that they should know everything in this space. Like, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me. I think it’s good to have a broad knowledge base, right? Like, I know what Facebook ads are, I’ve been in there, and I’ve run programs, but I’m not an expert. I would never take money from someone to run Facebook ads. And you know, I used to do paid searches, and I don’t do that anymore. 

 

And that’s, that’s okay. Right. But I think there’s a really big feeling amongst digital marketers that they need to understand everything within marketing, everything within digital marketing, where I think you know if you really want to make yourself not expendable, you need to figure out what your specific focus points going to be and really dive into that because it’s, you know, something Master of None kind of situation where, you know, if you’re a super generalist, yeah, you’ll find work, but you’ll never make the big money in this space, you need to really dive into one area and really understand that area. 

 

And I feel like people are getting the opposite information out there if like, be a generalist and know everything. I’m not saying I don’t have a passing understanding of all things, that’s fine. It’s just impossible to be an expert on all things. It’s not realistic, and it’s not gonna, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. I think figuring out your niche and where you can become an expert as a thought leader. early on. That’s what I did early on in SEO, I knew it became a thought leader in it. I know social media too. 

 

But I just went hard on SEO, and it paid off. I say the same thing that copywriters do all the time. Don’t be a copywriting generalist. What’s your niche? What are you the expert in? That’s how you get big money? copywriting, right? You’re just a general copy, I can write everything cool. Like, that’s a generalist that’s gonna get paid like a generalist. 

 

So I see the same thing on my teams where people are like, when they copy, press, you know, we want training, but we want generalization and all this stuff. It’s like no, just hone in on what you want to do. I do think there’s a point before you hone in where you need to go to the buffet and figure out what you like, you know what I mean? But once you figure that out, I think honing in and really becoming an expert in what you do is important.

 

Kenny Soto 21:33  

Why should content marketers care? Just as much about attribution as they do the content they create?

 

Dave Snyder 21:42  

Do you mean, like, attributing from the content that they create?

 

Kenny Soto 21:47  

Yeah, like actually proving the content is generating a return on investment?

 

Dave Snyder 21:52  

Okay, I gotcha. Yeah. 100%. I mean, that’s her job. I, you know, I’ve talked about this, like 1000 times, where you’re literally like, as a marketer, I’m sorry, we don’t, we’re not here to save the world. Like, sometimes I wake up and like, I’m not adding a lot to society. But our job is to make somebody money at the end of the day, somewhere, right? And so attribution is the way to do it. You can walk into a sea-level meeting and be like, well, this thing we did was really cool. 

 

And it got shared by this influencer like no one cares, right? The end of the day needs to be attributed back to dollars. I also think it’s why I’m very much against homerun approaches where you put all your eggs in one basket for one big campaign. Because the odds are against you in that kind of game. I like content campaigns that can be sliced and diced and re-utilized in different ways to get more value and ROI from the spend. And then being able to attribute it back to whatever the initial KPI is. 

 

And I think that’s an issue I see oftentimes, too, with people that when they’re planning campaigns, from a content perspective, they don’t start with the ROI KPI factors. It’s almost like, hey, we need to do content. Like that’s not an initiative, you know what I mean? So the question is like, why? And, for what end game? That’s an important conversation as well.

 

Kenny Soto 23:24  

I think I saw you talk about this on LinkedIn in the past. Why should marketers study sales letters?

 

Dave Snyder 23:33  

Yeah, I mean, like old-school sales letters, I think is probably what I was talking about. So like, in the 6070s, we were talking about, like Don Draper days, you know, what we used to happen was, you know, like, in your mailbox, you’d get a letter and it’d be like a two-page letter with all kinds of information trying to get you to buy something, or traditionally, you saw these in magazines as well, right? And it’s because they’re telling amazing stories, and those sales letters, like they create a hero and those sales letters, they bind you in with a problem that needs to be overcome, that you can’t, as a consumer empathizes with. 

 

And I think we as marketers often forget that entire model, right? We never started from the point of the consumer’s journey and think what pain point am I trying to solve? We’re just like, almost immediately, like, here’s the product. Here are the features, right? And product and features aren’t what marketing is. That’s just the basic information. 

 

That doesn’t make people want to buy anything, right? It’s not why people will spend 1000s on an apple, right, or on an iPhone or whatever. It’s the story behind that. It’s the desires that go into that so I think that’s why I like old school. Well, sales writing is something interesting to look into. I mean, there are tons of books written by those guys. And a lot of it, you know, it’s funny, you’ll read it, you’re like, the sales letters don’t make any sense nowadays, right? But from the standpoint of building that messaging in that journey, and trying to figure out alright, well, how do I, how do I approach my content from that perspective? I think that’s really helpful.

 

Kenny Soto 25:24  

One thing that changed my career for the better, especially as an SEO specialist and slash content writer was reading the boron letters. Once I read that I got a sense of like, no matter where the person is reading it, whether it’s physical, on the phone, tablet, or desktop, is the writing compelling enough to keep reading through, right? And yeah, and I think for the most part, as channels emerge as tactics change, or there are new ones coming through, you got to go back to the basics. Is this something that someone’s going to want to read?

 

Dave Snyder 26:01  

100% I mean, go back to the TIC tock challenge, right of it of like, I’ve got 10 seconds to get their attention, am I going to get them to go to my next video, or they’re going to keep scrolling to the next thing? Almost all of our content is like that. Now if you’re great, create a great article on a topic somebody is looking for. Are they going to stick to that? Are they going back to Google to find the next article to hit the attention span issues a real issue, I think.

 

Kenny Soto 26:30  

I have been tasked in my new position with my new team to manage our blog. And luckily enough, I am working with a team, both within marketing and also at the C suite level, where they understand the value of SEO, and I have the resources available to me to actually push that effort forward. Not just this year, but for many years to come. How should companies be building a blog this year?

 

Dave Snyder 27:00  

Yeah, so um, you know, there’s two, let’s talk about what a blog is, right? So like with me, I think that the blog becomes like this catch-all term. Right? And so depending on who you are, and what kind of company you are, let’s look at b2b first, like b2b, I think what often ends up in a blog should really be split into two types of content. And one of them might not maybe be on the blog, that type is like knowledge content, it’s what’s going to end up in your featured snippet, right? It’s the evergreen content that answers questions in the buying cycle. 

 

This is going to be probably the most valuable content you create because it also leads inevitably to conversion or service pages, right? Because, again, b2b, for me, in that context, the blog becomes about the personality and ethos of the company itself, right? So you know, in a b2b context, you might be like, Well, what does that mean? It’s like, well, no, I think when you’re getting your non-evergreen listicle type of, here’s our thoughts on the industry thought leadership stuff goes on the blog. 

 

So you got your evergreen stuff and a knowledge base. Other stuff in a blog, again, because I think they’re, they’re serving two different people. And also how you categorize knowledge content doesn’t adhere to a blog structure where it’s very timeline oriented, right? Then from the E-commerce or consumer side, I think a similar thing, except you kind of, have like your buyer’s guides, Evergreen type of content catalog copy on the product description. And again, your blog should be styled and like, you know what I mean, our ethos, like news about the company, but also like, information. 

 

So, you know, I think depending on, you know, someone in your position needs to be like, Oh, what are we trying to accomplish? Right, so going back to that initial question, well, we want more search traffic. All right. So we’re probably looking at needing to divide somewhere, right? Because you’re, you know, in this context, is it b2b.

 

Kenny Soto 29:09  

It’s b2c, it’s a car insurance company.

 

Dave Snyder 29:12  

Okay, well, car insurance, right? Again, still, a knowledge base would be needed, right? Because you’re gonna have people asking questions. Can I have insurance? If I have points on my license? That’s like the cheapest kind of insurance you can get in Washington, whatever these questions are, they don’t fit on a blog in my perspective, right? But the blog is a great place to discuss like, you know, other topics, like five ways that you can help lower your car insurance, blah, blah, blah, right, though also an important topic but not the same for me as the other thing. 

 

Then, my one thing I’ll tell people is like, we build a piece of software called automatic like a copy, press that does topical analysis. Take your keyword research, which we’ve always looked at linearly, and figure out what topics are kind of. You know, different keywords can go into a single topic, for example, cheap car insurance, and Washington, Washington car insurance for less, you know, less expensive car insurance in Washington. 

 

Those are three different keywords, but topically, that’s one article, right? So doing topic creation and figuring out where your value is, because you should be able to as a marketer pretty much take that keyword research and put a potential traffic value on that, and go back to a C suite and be like, Hey, I’m gonna have to pay $300 for this article. 

 

But if we write it and rank in the top 20, for most of the terms, I’ll drive this much traffic and this many conversion estimations, right? And that’s what I mean, like, how often do you see people approaching content like that? Not often, and that’s how it should be approached. 

 

We do that with our customers. And you don’t have to give them exact metrics. But you can give general guidance on hey, I’m going to spend this and we’re going to earn this right. The secondary level of that, just so you know, is early on getting buy-in for conversion analysis as well, right? Just creating the content cool, and getting traffic school, but now they’re on the site. 

 

Now what? So you know, in the insurance space, as an example, like doing secondary conversions, where people can download more information, brochures, sign up for blah, blah, blah, getting a way for them to buy, they’ve hit the content, how do we get more information from them, or move them on to the path, right? Because I see too many people just create content and say, right, cool. Well, what am I supposed to do from here? Now?

 

Kenny Soto 31:43  

Two more questions, I want to dive a little deeper. As an SEO specialist, one of the challenges that I have, especially when I’m trying to explain what I do to other members of the team at large is trying to explain that obviously, the content I’m creating is designed to be searchable to rank on search, but at the same time, it has to be enjoyable. How do you find that balance between this is content that people want to read? And this is content that the crawler is looking for to put on the search engine return page?

 

Dave Snyder 32:16  

Yeah, man, I think I think you can get both done in one piece. So you know, it’s a matter of like, we should make every piece of content, something that somebody wants to read, throw out, right? But also, depending on our goals, that content has to be formatted in a certain way. So as an example, if we’re writing a piece of content that we want to show up and a featured snippet for what I call a definitive listing, right? So what is car insurance, right? I’m gonna want an h1 or some kind of header with what is car insurance towards the top and a definition. 

 

And then more content, I think one of the cores is making content really quickly scannable. And so you’ll see now with a lot of media or media articles, they’ve got the index at the top where you can quickly click through it. So I think making it visually appealing, having quality images in play, and the quality of the content, all important things. But then also making sure that within that context that you’re thinking about, how is it going to show up and do well? How do we want it to act? Right? I think that’s how you kind of balance those two things.

 

Kenny Soto 33:32  

Dave, my last question for you is hypothetical, because time machines don’t exist. But if they did, and you can go back in time, about 10 years into the past, knowing everything you know, today, how would you accelerate the speed of your career?

 

Dave Snyder 33:47  

Oh, man, I mean. I don’t know man, I guess I mean, I would probably, honestly that’s a tough question because I kind of like how things have worked out even though my career was partially a disaster for different methods. But I think that the pain is the best learning sometimes you gotta go through tough stuff, man. You know, if everything’s easy for you, kind of like you don’t learn a lot in life. But you know, I think that I would have at least pushed harder on the AI stuff early on. 

 

Trying to understand that incorporated more. I think there was like a five-year span expanse where I like, I was one of those guys. It’s like us versus the robots. Do you know what I mean? Like they’re coming for our jobs. And I think that if I would have incorporated that sooner, maybe we would have seen more success because a lot of copy press success in the last three or four years was building thematical, which is a machine learning system, right? So it’s like, once we started incorporating that things started to change for us. 

 

Um, but for other people, I mean, one thing I did well, early on, and I made my last bit of advice is to go to conferences and network with people to build up a network. And don’t be a douchebag when you do it right. Like me, be yourself Be genuine be a caring person, You’ll be really surprised how that network will yield for you over time, right? And I’m someone who believes you shouldn’t just take so also give to that network be someone who’s giving to them as much as there as you’re taking from it.

 

Kenny Soto 35:33  

Gave if anyone wanted to find you online. Where can they go to say, Hello?

 

Dave Snyder 35:37  

Yeah, I’m on Twitter at Dave Schneider. I don’t do a lot on there anymore because it’s a hellscape. But you can also email me, D Schneider, a copy press.com I love talking to young marketers. And then you just copy press.com as the website.

 

Kenny Soto 35:53  

Thanks, Dave, for your time today and thank you to your listener for listening to another episode of the people’s Digital Marketing podcast with your host Kenny Soto. And as always, if you can, please rate us on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and have a good week. 

 

Bye.