Episode 130 - Outsourcing Your Content Creation with Dale L. Roberts
April 26, 2022
This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Dale L. Roberts of Self Publishing with Dale discusses OUTSOURCING YOUR CONTENT CREATION. He talks about trading money for time; crafting the idea; recency, consistency, and relevance; vetting ghostwriters; credit and responsibility; and considerations for content reuse.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my new YouTube playlist 2 MINUTES OF INDY, where over the week following the airing of the episode, I’ll be posting brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics! You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my new YouTube playlist 2 MINUTES OF INDY, where over the week following the airing of the episode, I’ll be posting brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics! You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there.
Dale L. Roberts is a fitness author, video content creator, and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the Top 100 websites and Top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Dale has cemented his position as the go-to authority in the indie author community. Anyone who meets Dale for the first time will discover his enthusiasm and passion for business and life. When Dale isn’t publishing books, creating videos, and networking with business professionals, he loves to travel with his wife Kelli and spend time playing with his cat Izzie. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Download | Amazon Music | Android | Apple | Google Podcasts | Libsyn | RSS | Spotify | Stitcher | YouTube
"We say that an author should have a website. But the problem is we can't just set up a website and walk away from it. In order to fully maximize the use of website, a blog is sometimes essential in order to do search engine optimization. But you don't have to do all of that. You can outsource a lot of this process." —Dale L. Roberts
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Links
Dale on outsourcing content creation:
Referenced episodes:
Dale's links:
- Increase Your Visibility As an Author With Blogs from Fiverr Sellers
- I Hired 5 Article and Blog Post Writers on Fiverr
Referenced episodes:
Dale's links:
- Website – http://selfpublishingwithdale.com
- YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/selfpublishingwithdale
- Twitter – https://twitter.com/selfpubwithdale
- Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/selfpubwithdale
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/selfpubwithdale/
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest this Dale Roberts. Say, Dale, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Dale: Matty! I'm great!
[00:00:08] Matty: You're always great. You're always in an optimistic and cheerful mood.
[00:00:12] Dale: Yeah. 99.9% of the time. The other times I'm just brooding, angry.
[00:00:18] Matty: We'll try to minimize that experience and maximize the first experience during our conversation.
[00:00:23] So to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Dale L Roberts is a fitness author, video content creator and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the top 100 websites and top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Dale has cemented his position as the go-to authority in the indy author community, and I agree with that.
[00:00:40] Anyone who meets Dale for the first time will discover his enthusiasm and passion for business and life. And when Dale isn't publishing books, creating videos and networking with business professionals, he loves to travel with his wife, Kelly, and he lives in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:00:52] And Dale is a frequent visitor to The Indy Author Podcast. He was on way back in 34 "The Importance of a Video Presence", 44 "Using Aggregators versus Going Direct", 74, there's a theme there, "Perspectives on Personal Branding." He was one of the people who weighed in on that as well as 82 "Perspectives on Writer's Block." And he also helped me out with in-betweenisode 86 which was "Behind the Scenes of Matty's Keyword Overhaul."
[00:01:20] And I asked Dale to come back to talk about outsourcing your content creation. And this was based on an article that I actually, I have to say, when I issued the invitation, I pretty much just skimmed. But the article was called, "Increase Your Visibility as an Author with Blogs from Fiverr Sellers." And I will provide a link to that as well as the YouTube version in the show notes. And I wanted to just start out Dale, to ask you to explain what the experiment was that you were doing, that you described in that article.
[00:01:49] Dale: It's pretty funny that it all started with Fiverr, to be honest with you. And it was part of a sponsorship deal, so some people would be like, he's paid to say that. Yes, I was. I was paid to say that, but in the same instance, I don't get behind a brand product or service without first really trusting them.
Trading Money for Time
[00:02:06] The biggest issue that authors run into is the lack of time, and sometimes the lack of resources. And we say this often that, hey, an author should probably have a website. But the problem is we can't just set up a website and just walk away from it and go, well, there we go, it's all set. In order to really fully maximize the use of website, a blog is sometimes essential in order to do what's called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Now a lot of authors are going to go, okay, you're asking me to go write a blog and then I've got to search engine optimize this thing, and I've got to do multiple things of this? Like I got to do blogs on a regular basis in order to actually become searchable through most search engines?
[00:02:53] Yes, but you don't have to do all of that. Really, to be honest with you, you can outsource a lot of this process. Now, a lot of people, unfortunately look at ghostwriting as something sleazy when it is not. So long as it represents your values and your moral code, and it doesn't deviate from what your audience expects from you, then outsourcing that makes sense.
[00:03:18] So I was thinking of the problem being, authors want to become more discoverable. We can do it through any variety of places, but we're focused on websites right now. With that being said, okay, I can build out this website, but by gosh, I'm working on my latest novel, Dale, or I'm trying to market this other miniseries that I have going out through Kindle Vella. You're asking me to do a blog post?
[00:03:44] And so I had my Eureka moment. Now, can I give you a backstory on this? This is very interesting because I came with this with a lot of reservation. Fiverr reached out to me about a couple of years ago and they're like, hey, we'd love to do a series with you, we want you to go from ideation to publication. Just take everything through and just show everything you can use in Fiverr for it. I was like, great! I went ahead and wrote my own little, short read, I had it edited, I did all that stuff, got it all ready to go. And I was like, okay, here's how it goes.
[00:04:16] They go, ah, yeah, we understand you can write, but they're like, we want you to use one of our ghostwriting services. And I was like, no. They have no issue in me saying this, and the reason why I said no initially was, I heard so many horror stories of people utilizing ghostwriters over on Fiverr's platform. Because let's be realistic, Fiverr does have a lot of great freelancers on their platform, but they aren't able to vet out or weed out a lot of the undesirable ne'er do wells, if you will. And so I just had a lot of reservations and they're like, look, just give it a shot, we'll even curate three writers for you that are great. We'll pay for it all, so that way, if it goes bad, you could say, I told you so.
[00:05:04] I went ahead, and I did it. I was like, oh my gosh, this is great. I even crosschecked to make sure it wasn't plagiarized. No. Everything measured up just right. Fantastic! So that's when I was like, oh, so this ghostwriting thing really isn't all that bad. There are actually some great content writers. And so that's where I thought of the problem of more blog posts. How do we do that? Okay. We either sacrifice our time, or we sacrifice just a little bit of an investment in somebody else to build it for us.
Crafting the Idea
[00:05:35] Now, crafting that idea and getting it put together and handed to this freelancer or this ghostwriter, it makes all the difference. Because you can't just go over and go, hey, write me a blog post. No, you need to make sure this person's on the same page and they have specific expectations that are met through you. So that way everything turns out as it should, and then you don't feel, first of all, sleazy about it or anything else.
[00:05:59] Fun fact, Matty, that piece that you skimmed over, that was written by a freelancer. In fact, I had an entire series written by some of these ghostwriters. Now, to be clear, I do not have ghostwriters on my own books. Anything that I write, typically, that's me inside my books. But when it came to my website, I was like, hey, all bets are off, because as long as I'm providing the same value that people come to expect of me and my brand and my website, then it's game on.
[00:06:31] Matty: And I think an important thing to emphasize is that I believe that the content you gave them was that you recorded a video of you speaking on a particular topic and the video is what you provided to them. So you were providing the content, but you weren't massaging it into blog post format. Is that correct?
[00:06:48] Dale: Bingo. So this made my life easier and putting together this through video form, that way it didn't deviate far from how I speak, far from my goofy vernacular sometimes. Good Lord. I say this in interviews sometimes, but yeah, it made it easier for my brief. So I didn't have to sit here and go, don't do this, do this, please do this, but not that. I was able to go, here's a video, I need you to go ahead and download the transcript from this, and I want you to build out an article based on this. Please don't deviate too far from it. If you feel like you have to, cite any sources, that way I can always go ahead and link back to that. And of course I was always very clear to them, no plagiarism. I was like, I'm giving you all the information that you need, that you can plagiarize for me, so that way it is me.
[00:07:41] Matty: There are sort of two topics I want to pursue here. One is blogs and one is the outsourcing part. So I wanted to start with the blogs and ask your opinion about how the relevance, maybe not relevance, how blogs have changed over time in terms of how viewers are accessing them and the benefit that an author can get from blogs? Because blog sounds very like nineties in a way.
Recency, Consistency, and Relevance
[00:08:07] Dale: It does. It's one of those cases that a lot of people, I think, believe that blogs have long since been abandoned, but I'm getting thousands in unique visitors per week on my website, primarily to all the blogs. And this is not through me sending it, it's all through Google search engine or other search engines like DuckDuckGo. Using blogs is one of the single most effective ways to, first of all, if you're a nonfiction author, you can lean further into your authority and your credibility within your given niche. Your audience has a problem, you give them a solution. The nice thing is this blog plays like content marketing. It's one way for me to content market my books without beating them over the head or market my YouTube videos.
[00:08:59] Now, when it comes to fiction authors, it becomes a little bit more dicey. So it's understanding your audience. What's their pain point? What would intrigue them to come and visit your site? Could it be like the five most popular tropes and werebear shape-shifter romance? Or maybe it's like my top 10 favorite fantasy authors.
[00:09:21] Things like that is going to attract an audience, versus if I were just to set up a website and then just go, that's it, front page, I've got my About page, I got my Contact page and my bookshelf. I'm good to go. That's fine, but there's not too much value that people are going to find in that.
[00:09:39] So a lot of people go, websites don't work these days, I don't see the value in it. If you're just setting up simply just to put your flag in the dirt, then that's all well and good, but in order to make it more searchable, you need to put in more consistent and relevant content, and that comes by way of blogs. It could even be just a simple article writing of some sort, if you don't feel like calling it a blog, that's just fine.
[00:10:05] So it all comes down to search engine optimization. Recency and consistency and relevancy, all work hand in hand when it comes to search engine optimization.
[00:10:16] So how recent was your post? How consistent are you posting and how relevant? Relevancy is all driven by the engagement that your post gets on a regular basis. So if you've got an email list of some sort and you launch a blog, by gosh, you better get ahold of those people, send them over to that blog post. That way it starts to build relevancy for all the search engines and sends even more traffic of people that are similar to your current audience. Pretty cool, right?
[00:10:48] Matty: Yeah, when I was looking through the, I think it was five contractors from Fiverr that you tried out for this experiment, whose prices ranged wildly. I want to talk about that in a minute, when we talk about the contractor part. But they were defining the services they offered based on words, focus keywords, topic research, references, and citations. And can you describe a little bit what each of those meant in the context of a blog and how you assessed their ability to deliver those?
Vetting Ghostwriters
[00:11:21] Dale: Well, obviously, writing an article just by itself is not enough. I mean, that's great. It's good to put out content, but it needs to have purpose. Because I want you to think of this like a casino. It's a bit of a gamble. You're obviously hiring somebody, so you're going to put your money into essentially like an avenue of marketing. We want to make sure that this is returning. And so the return of that money on investment, we want to make sure there's more visitors. How do we make sure there are more visitors? We have to make sure it's search engine optimized.
[00:11:53] So that's why you have to get on the same page with that freelancer about, okay, I want you to focus on two to three good keywords. Those three keywords will have some interrelated relevancy with each other. Knowing what those keywords are going to be comes down to you and your niche. So what is it that you're typically searching for on Amazon when you try to find your book? That could probably be one of many keywords that you can utilize. But having those keywords organically worked within a post makes all the difference.
[00:12:29] Simply putting that keyword once, isn't enough, but then putting it in a hundred times is too much. You have to find that balance. And this is where there's different plugins. Right now, the one that I use, or my team uses, one of them was Yoast, I know for sure. Oh, Rank Math was the other one and Rank Math is a hundred percent free. You can put it in there and you'll tell them what your keywords are, and then it'll be able to tell you whether or not it's appearing in there enough times, in order to actually become relevant for search traffic.
[00:13:01] But you want to make sure you're going through each one of these freelancers and making sure that they, first of all, have samples that you can read and make sure that they're actually writing some content that you can get behind. The next thing is, are they familiar with search engine optimization? Can they be able to do their own keyword research, because that actually is a big plus. If I can just say, hey, look, I'm in the Health and Fitness niche or Men Over the Age of 45. Could you be able to find me two to three keywords and work this into a blog post for me? And so that part's kind of nice. If you can hand it off to a freelancer who will do the keyword research for you, all the better. But coming to the table with that keyword makes life a little bit easier. So if you know exactly what you want, obviously the freelancer's going to better deliver that to you. So that's why it's like, you really want to look and see what they have to offer.
[00:13:55] There's other bells and whistles some people will put into it, like, I will give you unlimited drafts and things like that. I'm never impressed by that, because that usually makes me worry, because I'm like, why do I need unlimited revisions? If I see revisions, like two to three times, I'm like, okay, this person knows what they're doing, or they're awful cocky.
[00:14:17] Matty: Yeah. It's buyer beware if somebody saying unlimited, that just seems like a red flag to begin with.
[00:14:22] Dale: Yeah, it really does. It worries me because we're trying to save time. We don't want to be volleying back and forth with this freelancer. Like, well, you know, the second paragraph wasn't quite right, and you didn't implement at least three different times the keyword inside this post. It's just, it becomes messy. The times I did, I worked with these bloggers, I think I asked for one revision from one of them. Beyond that though, each one of them gave me pretty satisfactory stuff, and of course I went in, and I did a little bit of tooling with some of the copy in it. But beyond that, it was so minor that honestly, it was probably like one or two words that I went and fixed and maybe a sentence seemed a little awkward and I just corrected it.
[00:15:03] Matty: Yeah. Well, we talked about the criteria that I mentioned the words, focus, word, topic, research, references, and citations. The topic research, where you relying on them to do much research beyond what you gave them in the video?
[00:15:16] Dale: No, I wasn't relying on them, but I could have asked them to do that. For me at that specific time, I was working on a deadline based on the sponsorship with Fiverr, so I didn't want to muddy up the process and put in like, hey, you need to go look up this. And also it really got it to where they knew exactly the voice I wanted then. If they went and they did their own research and pulled up, say three or four or five, six articles and such, that's great for me because, granted, I have some sources that I can cite inside this, and it really aids in relevancy for this.
[00:15:49] And by the way, backlinks, reputable websites love when you provide a backlink to them as a cited source. And there's been times even where I've had companies reach out to me that I've cited before and they go, hey, we couldn't help but notice you did a backlink of our thing. Could you update it to this? It's really neat, because it's like networking without even trying, just putting that stuff up and they reach out to me. But does that kind of answer the question?
[00:16:12] Matty: Yeah, it sounds like the topic research, references, and citations is not something that you used actively for the experiment we're talking about because of the deadline you were under, but that depending on the expectation you set with the contractor, you would want to make sure that they were citing the sources they were going to, that they were referencing accurately and diligently.
[00:16:33] Dale: Yeah, exactly. And here's a little bit of a tip. When you're doing your blog posts, make sure that you're doing two inbound links, meaning that you're linking to two of your own blog posts. Now, starting out, it's going to be kind of hard to do that, but as you start to build out, you can retroactively go back and fix those blog posts to have two inbound links. The next thing is you're going to want to have two outbound links. Now it's not enough that you just go and grab some random hyperlink and associate it to your thing. Do your research.
[00:17:03] Let's say for instance, I say Kindle Direct Publishing is a great avenue, and then I just go ahead, and I hyperlink say, Kindle Direct Publishing to an article done by say The Good e-Reader. And it talks about all the pros and cons of Kindle Direct Publishing. By having that inbound traffic, it helps out, of course, raising more relevancy within my website. And the next thing is the outbound ones, again, the networking perspective side of things, but it also gets it to where search engines go, ooh, there's something important about this piece because it's tied in with all these other pieces. And if you have one piece that you're doing outbound traffic to, and it's already pulling really good traffic, then chances are very likely that's going to rub off on you to a certain extent. Bonus points, if you can reach out to that other person that has posted that article and get them to link to your post, oh, it's beautiful. Your search engine optimization is going to be off the charts.
[00:18:03] Which by the way, if you've been in this long enough, and I'm not sure if this has happened with you, Matty, that you will get someone reaching out to you. Hey, I will write a guest blog post for you. Well, it's a good reason why people will do that for free for you, because they are typically looking to write that piece for you, linked to relevant articles they've posted elsewhere that drives more engagement and more relevancy to that specific topic. Most times, by the way, anybody that reaches out to me for guest blog posts, I usually turn them down because I'm very, very specific on what I want.
Credit and Responsibility
[00:18:35] Matty: Yeah. And so the final question I had specific to blogs was how are you alerting the readers of your blog, if you are, that it was contributed to or written by a contractor?
[00:18:49] Dale: I do that right at the very closing of it. Some people would probably disagree with me and say, I should right out the gate, say this was ghostwritten by such and such. But with each one of those, I made sure I linked in the very bottom. Now there's a good reason why you want to do that because if the tone shifts differently from how you normally speak, then chances are very likely some people are going to go, whoa, there's a different tone of voice.
[00:19:15] Now, conversely speaking, can you go without crediting that person? Absolutely. You own that work a hundred percent. So it doesn't matter if Tom, Dick, or Harry wrote it, because you own it. So you could say, I wrote it. You don't necessarily need to come out and say that directly, okay. Don't ever, yeah, I wrote every single one of these posts, and you had them ghostwritten and such. And in that event, you just, it's a simple thing. I use WordPress. Or do you use WordPress at all?
[00:19:43] Matty: I use Weebly.
[00:19:44] Dale: Okay, so you use Weebly. My WordPress uses, I bet you Weebly probably has something built in to where, when you have a guest blog post of some sort, you can credit to an author within your dashboard. And what I'll do is I'll have, Ava, my assistant, she actually puts together profiles for each of the authors that will have their bio, their picture, and all the relevant links. So when the post is posted, WordPress automatically, based on what she selects as the author, will fill that out at the very bottom of the post.
[00:20:16] So instances like when I did the Fiverr one, you'll probably go look at those Fiverr posts. You'll see at the very bottom, this post was written as part of this project, blah, blah, blah, yackety, shmackety, and then below it, Dale Roberts' author bio. She's probably going, wait, I'm kind of confused. Yes, because I didn't put those Fiverr authors as an author profile through WordPress, we just went ahead and just defaulted over to me for the time being, because we just trust that people are going to be able to see that point of me saying, this was ghostwritten by these Fiverr freelancers.
[00:20:49] Matty: And I think it also highlights another important fact that regardless of if you have somebody helping you with the writing, you're responsible for the final product. So even if your fingers weren't on the keyboard, you better be ready to back up what you're posting. It's your blog.
[00:21:05] Dale: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:07] Matty: So that was what I wanted to talk about blog wise, although we're going to loop back to some things, but I'm wondering how specific this is to blog posts. And here's my reason. This is what I started thinking as I was reading your article. So for every episode of the podcast, I have a full transcript, I have show notes that link to my guests' website, social media posts, I link to other episodes if I referenced them in that episode. So as I was reading it, what I was thinking is that currently, I automatically generate a 90%, 95% accurate transcript from Descript. I actually have somebody help me on the cleanup. And I do certain things like highlighting key phrases, and the speaker names are identified in the timestamps. That's all done automatically.
[00:21:53] But what I started thinking is, I would love to take that material and have somebody else tidy it up, because a guest and I might be talking about topic A, we switch to topic B and then we switched back to topic A and it's fine in the conversation, but if I were writing it up as an article, I would rearrange things so that they were in better order. Have you considered using the contractors for that kind of work?
[00:22:16] Dale: That's actually a pretty smart idea. Have I considered it? No, no, that's actually really, really good idea. Right, right, because I have, I just started a whole new podcast interview series here and I imagine that would really, really be awesome to do that, and getting it to where we can segment maybe from an interview, we could probably have three different things we're talking about and we could probably turn that into three different posts altogether, if we wanted to, based on how varied the content was.
[00:23:17] Matty: Yeah, I think that there's such a move toward bite-sized pieces of content, and I've been trying to do that. Probably by the time this episode comes out, I will have announced that I have a playlist on my YouTube channel now called Two Minutes of Indy, where after each episode, I'll take six 2-minute snippets from the interview. And so I highlight the interview one day and then for the following six days until the next episode is available, every day, I'll post about a 2-minute snippet because two minutes and 20 seconds is all you can do on Twitter and post it natively on Twitter.
[00:23:49] And so I can see, just as you're suggesting that doing the same thing with textual content is great because I have a surprising number of people tell me that they do not listen to the podcasts, they read the transcripts. I'm like, really? And it is just once again, the danger of assuming everybody operates the way you do.
[00:24:07] But then I was thinking even beyond that. here was where I got hung up a little bit, because I think that the articles that you were having done for your blog posts were about 1000 to 1500 words, is that correct?
[00:24:21] Dale: Yeah, to my recollection. It's been a little bit since I did that project.
[00:24:24] Matty: Yeah. And my transcript, I looked at one of my recent transcripts, it was 8,000 words. So it would be comparably more expensive. In terms of the expense, talk a little bit, you had a wild range of prices that you were paying for these five test blog posts. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:24:47] Dale: The very first thing is, never assume that somebody who's cheaply priced is bad. Never assume though, that somebody who has a high price is going to be great. I found someone who wasn't the most expensive of them, two of them actually, I felt were really, really good. And their names are eluding my brain right now, but they were great. I didn't have to give them very much direction at all. There was nothing I needed to correct on their specific things because they deliver just as I expect them to.
[00:25:17] Matty: Just to give the listeners a sense, if I recall the range was from $5 to $150 or something like that.
[00:25:24] Dale: That seems about right.
[00:25:25] Matty: That's a big range. And I think the two that you liked were both, maybe in like the $80 to $100 range.
[00:25:33] Dale: They were the second and the third of the highest, because I think the highest was one that was recommended to me by my Fiverr contact. And she was like, hey, we use this guy for our Fiverr posts. And I was like, okay, that's enough proof for me, but I just happened to just go through. And I will spend, I would say an hour typically just going through Fiverr and searching. Because I'm looking at reviews, I'm looking at past comments, I'm looking at their deliverables. I'm looking at other gigs that they do and comments by those customers, because that's going to tell me, are they good with customer service? Are they good about delivering on time? Things like that.
[00:26:11] But I will tell you, I will tell you this, the $5 blog post, it was not worth it. First of all, she wrote everything in different fonts. She colored it all different, she put in some images that I don't know if she had the rights to. I'm just going, okay, what is going on here? And she closed out the post with, thanks for reading my post, byeeeee! And I, it was literally spelled B Y EEEEEE. Outside of me saying this right here, I have never in my life ever said anything like that to anybody, byeee! $5, not worth it.
[00:26:49] Now, there are other people out there that are $5 that are probably good, maybe, there's a good possibility, I'm hard pressed, if you find someone who's that good, please drop me a line because I will get on top of that. But man, it's all going to come down to just testing out maybe an option or two at first. So it's much like when you jump into Facebook Ads or Amazon Advertising, there's a little bit of a gamble factor involved, because you don't know the full process quite yet. But just going through a person's reviews, and if they've got a portfolio of some sort, so you can go and read what they've already done, that makes a huge difference, because you can go and read that and go, ho ho ho ho, no, no, no.
[00:27:34] And see, I think that was a problem I made with the $5 gig, where I was like, yeah, that looks good enough. It's horseshoes and hand grenades, close enough counts. I'm just going in and looking at this, but as far as what's the best range, it's just tough. It's just tough to say. It just depends on the type of content that you want written and the quality of content that you want done. And I understand that a lot of people can't spend $150 for a blog post and cross their fingers and hope that's going to start to open things up.
[00:28:03] When you look at something that's at a higher premium and you see me mentioning these types of things to you and you go, Dale, I am not making that type of money. Well, chances are very likely, I'm telling you to put a pin in it and come back to it later. There are other business owners though, that will watch that and go, okay, I don't have time to write a book, so I'm probably going to outsource that. I don't have time to do my website, I'm probably going to outsource for that. So there's some people who do have that discretionary expense to spend $150.
[00:28:30] But if you're new to something like this, start at the low end of things. I wouldn't recommend looking at the $5 case. Maybe look for something that's going to be, say $20 or more for something that's say, a thousand words. Your blog posts need to have some substance. I would recommend as a minimum having 800 words to as much as 1500 words. Include at least three to maybe four images, and each one of those images you want to have in the ALT text, your target keywords. So that way, it's another driving factor for relevancy.
[00:29:07] Matty: I would just throw my recommendation behind what you're saying about looking at people's history. I've done several gigs through Fiverr and have had pretty different, you know, from work that I just threw out and figured that was a lesson learned to some work that I loved. And what I found the commonality was in the work I loved on Fiverr and other platforms, I also use Upwork and Reedsy, and that track record, seeing that they've been doing it for a while, that they're specialized in the area that you're looking for. So I think that's important. As I recall, all of the people that you used from Fiverr advertised themselves as blog writers, they didn't advertise themselves generically as writers. So if focused on the area that you want, then that's good. And then, they've been at it for a while, they have happy other customers I think is key.
[00:29:52] Dale: Absolutely, couldn't agree more.
[00:29:55] Matty: Continuing on this route about what I could do with my content, really this podcast is all about answering my questions. Let's say that you have now collected a bunch of blog posts and you want to assemble them into a book. Is there any consideration legally or morally about doing something like that with the content that a third party has written for you?
[00:30:17] Dale: The biggest issue, well, I mean, there's going to be a lot of people out there if you're listening to this podcast and are outright against ghostwriting, I'm not trying to sell you on it. Honestly, I'm not going to be able to be the one who's going to convince you that ghostwriting is completely and totally ethical to be doing. But that's my opinion. That's how I feel about ghostwriting. Because at the end of the day, if something provides value to me, I don't care who wrote it. I am not so loyal to any one specific writer that I'm like, it must be this person. No, there are a ton of people out there that have had ghostwriters and put out fantastic books, put out fantastic blog articles and it makes no difference to me who wrote it.
Considerations for Content Reuse
[00:30:57] Dale: So if you end up taking this and turning it into a book is going to be the big question. And I will tell you that I've done this from experience. I did a book called "Gym Etiquette" and it was about a bunch of rules that are always, unspoken rules that are done in gyms, like dropping weights and groaning really loud and singing along to your favorite music, that type of thing. And I put them into blog posts that were funny. Yeah, I just, it was something that everybody can giggle and laugh about because everybody who's been in a gym in some capacity can relate to these things.
[00:31:27] And eventually I said to myself, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is enough for a good short book. But herein lies the problem. If I just grab this blog post and I just go and upload it to somewhere like Amazon KDP, you're going to run into some issues because then they've got crawlers, little web crawlers, that go around and explore the internet. And when they find text that exactly matches text of books that are inside their catalog, they're going to take umbrage. They're going to go, what are you doing? Why is this free, because you're selling it on our platform? They don't like that.
[00:32:02] So if you do go with using a blog post as a full-length book, what you're going to need to do is go back in. You're going to need to rework it, you're going to need to make sure that it's all tidied up. Maybe add some content or subtract some content but taking the same exact material and publishing it can put you into a position that isn't highly favored by Amazon KDP.
[00:32:27] Now let's just say, for instance, I'm a wide published author and I go to publish that wide. Chances are very likely when they discover that your content's free, they're going to send you a notice saying, hey, we saw your stuff for free, you're going to have to prove that you've got the right to this. So at that point, you have to prove that you have the copyright. No problem. Now, in the event that you can't, they're going to either take that book down or, worst case scenario, terminate your account. That's not good.
[00:32:59] Now, an extreme side of things, this is where you should not take it lightly. If you are taking those blog posts and you put it into an ebook and you enroll that ebook in the KDP Select program, now you've got a problem. Because you just agreed to them to exclusivity on their platform. And by saying you're going to be exclusive, that means anything electronically, this is not talking about print, not talking about audio book, anything electronically distributed should only be on Amazon's platform. So in the event that you do take a blog post and you go ahead, and you publish it over at KDP Select, that blog post better be gone and off your site before that even launches, because they discover that, you will have problems. Like it's not just a case of, hey, prove you have the rights. No, it's going to be like, you better prove you have the rights, and if you do have the rights, you're in violation.
[00:33:51] Matty: And that advice would hold regardless of who wrote the blog post. And that, I suppose that you need to be careful when you're examining the agreement that you have signed via Fiverr, that it enables you to use it, use that content in other ways. Do you know if your contracts would enable you to do that should you want to?
[00:34:14] Dale: With Fiverr, it's all inside their terms of service, you own whatever's distributed, unless it otherwise says within the gigs. So for instance, there are some times, and I don't like these gigs, where they will make your cover, and then they'll say, for commercial rights, you have to pay X amount more. I think that's rather skeezy, because what, am I going to just make a book cover so I can hang it up on my shelf or pin it on my fridge? That's stupid. But through Fiverr, anytime that you're buying a gig, as soon as you have approved that, it's a hundred percent yours.
[00:34:49] Now on the other platforms has been forever since I'd done Upwork and I've never done anything on Reedsy, so you need to read the fine print on each of those platforms, but to my recollection, Upwork, it's the same thing as Fiverr. As soon as that is done and you have approved it, you own 100% of those rights. You can distribute it however you wish.
[00:35:06] Matty: The Fiverr engagement that I was most happy with was that I wanted somebody to do some pen and ink drawings for me to use on merchandise. And because I wanted to do it on merchandise, I purchased the commercial license, which was actually only slightly more than the other license. But I think in her case, it's almost easier to understand, because my husband and I have also had the same woman do a picture of one of our dogs, which is never going to show up on merch, it's just for us to frame and hang on our wall, and you understand how that might be priced differently than, now I'm going to print this on a canvas tote bag and try to sell it to as many people as I can. Yeah, it's slightly different. I understand the rationale behind it in that case. In the case of a book cover, it is a little harder to understand.
[00:35:49] Dale: What, like, why am I having to pay for, of course I want to distribute this! Maybe some people just want to have a book cover that they do just want to hang on to, maybe it's something that will inspire them, and they can come back and buy the rights to the distribution. But to me, I think it's a rather underhanded way of doing things. And I'm not sure if Fiverr is aware of that happening on the platform. But for something like you, that makes sense.
[00:36:12] Matty: Yeah.
[00:36:12] Dale: When it's just something like my pop art in the background, I don't need to buy commercial rights to it, because I'm not distributing it anywhere else. I bought the pop art so it can hang up on my wall and I'm not going to plan on distributing it anywhere, so I don't see any reason to pay for that commercial license.
[00:36:25] Matty: Right. The Fiverr contractors that worked out well for you, are you continuing to do work with them? Do you see this as a long-term working relationship?
[00:36:34] Dale: Admittedly, there was a part of me that fooled myself into believing that I would work with the two of them. Corthoney, there we go. That was one of them, Corthoney, was great. And then the other one was a British fellow, I'm forgetting his name right now. Fantastic. I used him twice. I had the intent of continuing to work with them, but to be honest with you, I have so many plates spinning, that a lot of the blogging fell off to the side, and I haven't been able to focus on it as much as I can. And the old saying is, the man who chases two rabbits gets none. And between doing my podcast, doing my main channel, pivoting to fiction this year, I'm not sure if I told you about that yet. Managing my nonfiction, I have five titles ready to go. It's just one of those cases, I'm like blogging has been second priority on my list.
[00:37:21] And this is something I want to impress upon your listeners is, if now's not a good time, it's totally understandable. I get it. If you've got the finances, but you don't have the time to sit down and put these things together and manage those assets, then it doesn't make sense. So I don't want to be sitting here talking outside my mouth, go over and do some blogging, and then you're going to be like, wait, you did those posts a year ago. I will take that criticism to heart for sure. But please understand that there are so many aspects to my business and working with a team, that unfortunately trying to bring in two additional freelancers into the situation is only going to make matters worse and pile upon our already big, big plate of duties, chores, and projects.
[00:38:04] Matty: And you're already finding other ways to bring people to your content. A blog post on top of it is not as vital as it might be for some other people.
[00:38:10] Dale: Right. I'm fortunate that I have the YouTube channel for the main channel, and then I have the podcast channel because all roads lead back over to my website where the blog posts are.
[00:38:21] Matty: Did you get any pushback from the people who read those blog posts about if they noticed that it had been contributed to or written by the person from Fiverr. Any pushback there?
[00:38:30] Dale: None whatsoever. None. A long time ago, probably 2016, 2017, when I was talking about ghostwriting on my channel, there was a clear divide in the sand. There were some people that were just like, it is unethical, it's immoral, it should not be done, you're fooling readers into believing that that's your work. And then you have the other side of things where people were like, that's smart business. I lie on that side of things, and I can understand there might be some people that are just steadfast lovers of the craft of writing, and they feel like it's being imposed on when somebody else is doing the work.
[00:39:08] Now, I want everybody to think of this just for a second. Again, I'm not trying to sell you on ghostwriting. Just remember that some writers truly don't want that front seat. They don't want that spotlight. All they want is less risk and more of a payout. It's less of a risk for them to write that post for you than to do it themselves and put it on their website and cross their fingers and hope for the best. Yes, you take the risk, but they also get their payday.
[00:39:36] And even my writing coach for years was ghostwriting for many trad pub and indy pub authors. And she's a fantastic author. She just decided finally, you know what, I'm going to take a risk on myself. Little did she know that in her first year, she would become one of the top Kindle Vella authors on the platform.
[00:39:56] Yeah, it's amazing. So, you know, ghostwriters sometimes, it's not just a case of they're lazy or that they do terrible work or anything else like that. They just don't want that risk and they don't want to be in that spotlight. So they're going to give it to you.
[00:40:12] Matty: And I can direct people to episode 95, which was "Finding and Being a Ghostwriter with Rob Archangel and Mikal Keefer."
[00:40:20] Dale: Great episode, by the way!
[00:40:21] Matty: Oh, thank you. Yeah, you know, Rob of Archangel, Inc. And then Mikal is one of the ghostwriters on his staff. And it was very interesting, it was interesting to see like the management perspective and then the writer perspective on that topic.
[00:40:32] One last question for you and, tell me if you can't answer this without being very specific and bringing up screen share. So I described what I'm doing with the podcast. I have the transcript, I have links, I have show notes, I have lots of relevant keywords that just occurred naturally because of the topic we're talking about. How can I tell what benefit, if any, I'm getting from an SEO point of view for that? What I don't want to ask you to do is describe based on a particular website platform how to do it, but can you describe generically how you can find out what benefit you're getting there?
[00:41:04] Dale: What you're going to want to do is make sure that you have a plugin or a widget of some sort on your website. I don't know what Weebly is going to have, but I know WordPress has got things like Slimstat, that's going to be able to show you the analytics. It's a hundred percent free. You plug it on in there and you'll be able to see which posts get the most traffic, and by which term was sought after that they discovered your post. So that's where you'd be able to see all the magic. Weebly probably has, I'm sure, some type of a widget that tracks analytics as well but knowing where that traffic comes from and where they land and why they landed there makes a huge difference.
[00:41:40] Like I said, I think Slimstat is the one that I use. Just a search up anything that's going to show analytics on your website, so you know who your traffic is, where it's coming from and why.
[00:41:52] Matty: Great. As always, Dale, this was wonderful to talk to you. You are always a font of information and please let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do in line.
[00:42:01] Dale: SelfPublishingWithDale.com.
[00:42:09] Matty: An excellent name. Thank you, Dale.
[00:00:05] Dale: Matty! I'm great!
[00:00:08] Matty: You're always great. You're always in an optimistic and cheerful mood.
[00:00:12] Dale: Yeah. 99.9% of the time. The other times I'm just brooding, angry.
[00:00:18] Matty: We'll try to minimize that experience and maximize the first experience during our conversation.
[00:00:23] So to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Dale L Roberts is a fitness author, video content creator and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the top 100 websites and top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Dale has cemented his position as the go-to authority in the indy author community, and I agree with that.
[00:00:40] Anyone who meets Dale for the first time will discover his enthusiasm and passion for business and life. And when Dale isn't publishing books, creating videos and networking with business professionals, he loves to travel with his wife, Kelly, and he lives in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:00:52] And Dale is a frequent visitor to The Indy Author Podcast. He was on way back in 34 "The Importance of a Video Presence", 44 "Using Aggregators versus Going Direct", 74, there's a theme there, "Perspectives on Personal Branding." He was one of the people who weighed in on that as well as 82 "Perspectives on Writer's Block." And he also helped me out with in-betweenisode 86 which was "Behind the Scenes of Matty's Keyword Overhaul."
[00:01:20] And I asked Dale to come back to talk about outsourcing your content creation. And this was based on an article that I actually, I have to say, when I issued the invitation, I pretty much just skimmed. But the article was called, "Increase Your Visibility as an Author with Blogs from Fiverr Sellers." And I will provide a link to that as well as the YouTube version in the show notes. And I wanted to just start out Dale, to ask you to explain what the experiment was that you were doing, that you described in that article.
[00:01:49] Dale: It's pretty funny that it all started with Fiverr, to be honest with you. And it was part of a sponsorship deal, so some people would be like, he's paid to say that. Yes, I was. I was paid to say that, but in the same instance, I don't get behind a brand product or service without first really trusting them.
Trading Money for Time
[00:02:06] The biggest issue that authors run into is the lack of time, and sometimes the lack of resources. And we say this often that, hey, an author should probably have a website. But the problem is we can't just set up a website and just walk away from it and go, well, there we go, it's all set. In order to really fully maximize the use of website, a blog is sometimes essential in order to do what's called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Now a lot of authors are going to go, okay, you're asking me to go write a blog and then I've got to search engine optimize this thing, and I've got to do multiple things of this? Like I got to do blogs on a regular basis in order to actually become searchable through most search engines?
[00:02:53] Yes, but you don't have to do all of that. Really, to be honest with you, you can outsource a lot of this process. Now, a lot of people, unfortunately look at ghostwriting as something sleazy when it is not. So long as it represents your values and your moral code, and it doesn't deviate from what your audience expects from you, then outsourcing that makes sense.
[00:03:18] So I was thinking of the problem being, authors want to become more discoverable. We can do it through any variety of places, but we're focused on websites right now. With that being said, okay, I can build out this website, but by gosh, I'm working on my latest novel, Dale, or I'm trying to market this other miniseries that I have going out through Kindle Vella. You're asking me to do a blog post?
[00:03:44] And so I had my Eureka moment. Now, can I give you a backstory on this? This is very interesting because I came with this with a lot of reservation. Fiverr reached out to me about a couple of years ago and they're like, hey, we'd love to do a series with you, we want you to go from ideation to publication. Just take everything through and just show everything you can use in Fiverr for it. I was like, great! I went ahead and wrote my own little, short read, I had it edited, I did all that stuff, got it all ready to go. And I was like, okay, here's how it goes.
[00:04:16] They go, ah, yeah, we understand you can write, but they're like, we want you to use one of our ghostwriting services. And I was like, no. They have no issue in me saying this, and the reason why I said no initially was, I heard so many horror stories of people utilizing ghostwriters over on Fiverr's platform. Because let's be realistic, Fiverr does have a lot of great freelancers on their platform, but they aren't able to vet out or weed out a lot of the undesirable ne'er do wells, if you will. And so I just had a lot of reservations and they're like, look, just give it a shot, we'll even curate three writers for you that are great. We'll pay for it all, so that way, if it goes bad, you could say, I told you so.
[00:05:04] I went ahead, and I did it. I was like, oh my gosh, this is great. I even crosschecked to make sure it wasn't plagiarized. No. Everything measured up just right. Fantastic! So that's when I was like, oh, so this ghostwriting thing really isn't all that bad. There are actually some great content writers. And so that's where I thought of the problem of more blog posts. How do we do that? Okay. We either sacrifice our time, or we sacrifice just a little bit of an investment in somebody else to build it for us.
Crafting the Idea
[00:05:35] Now, crafting that idea and getting it put together and handed to this freelancer or this ghostwriter, it makes all the difference. Because you can't just go over and go, hey, write me a blog post. No, you need to make sure this person's on the same page and they have specific expectations that are met through you. So that way everything turns out as it should, and then you don't feel, first of all, sleazy about it or anything else.
[00:05:59] Fun fact, Matty, that piece that you skimmed over, that was written by a freelancer. In fact, I had an entire series written by some of these ghostwriters. Now, to be clear, I do not have ghostwriters on my own books. Anything that I write, typically, that's me inside my books. But when it came to my website, I was like, hey, all bets are off, because as long as I'm providing the same value that people come to expect of me and my brand and my website, then it's game on.
[00:06:31] Matty: And I think an important thing to emphasize is that I believe that the content you gave them was that you recorded a video of you speaking on a particular topic and the video is what you provided to them. So you were providing the content, but you weren't massaging it into blog post format. Is that correct?
[00:06:48] Dale: Bingo. So this made my life easier and putting together this through video form, that way it didn't deviate far from how I speak, far from my goofy vernacular sometimes. Good Lord. I say this in interviews sometimes, but yeah, it made it easier for my brief. So I didn't have to sit here and go, don't do this, do this, please do this, but not that. I was able to go, here's a video, I need you to go ahead and download the transcript from this, and I want you to build out an article based on this. Please don't deviate too far from it. If you feel like you have to, cite any sources, that way I can always go ahead and link back to that. And of course I was always very clear to them, no plagiarism. I was like, I'm giving you all the information that you need, that you can plagiarize for me, so that way it is me.
[00:07:41] Matty: There are sort of two topics I want to pursue here. One is blogs and one is the outsourcing part. So I wanted to start with the blogs and ask your opinion about how the relevance, maybe not relevance, how blogs have changed over time in terms of how viewers are accessing them and the benefit that an author can get from blogs? Because blog sounds very like nineties in a way.
Recency, Consistency, and Relevance
[00:08:07] Dale: It does. It's one of those cases that a lot of people, I think, believe that blogs have long since been abandoned, but I'm getting thousands in unique visitors per week on my website, primarily to all the blogs. And this is not through me sending it, it's all through Google search engine or other search engines like DuckDuckGo. Using blogs is one of the single most effective ways to, first of all, if you're a nonfiction author, you can lean further into your authority and your credibility within your given niche. Your audience has a problem, you give them a solution. The nice thing is this blog plays like content marketing. It's one way for me to content market my books without beating them over the head or market my YouTube videos.
[00:08:59] Now, when it comes to fiction authors, it becomes a little bit more dicey. So it's understanding your audience. What's their pain point? What would intrigue them to come and visit your site? Could it be like the five most popular tropes and werebear shape-shifter romance? Or maybe it's like my top 10 favorite fantasy authors.
[00:09:21] Things like that is going to attract an audience, versus if I were just to set up a website and then just go, that's it, front page, I've got my About page, I got my Contact page and my bookshelf. I'm good to go. That's fine, but there's not too much value that people are going to find in that.
[00:09:39] So a lot of people go, websites don't work these days, I don't see the value in it. If you're just setting up simply just to put your flag in the dirt, then that's all well and good, but in order to make it more searchable, you need to put in more consistent and relevant content, and that comes by way of blogs. It could even be just a simple article writing of some sort, if you don't feel like calling it a blog, that's just fine.
[00:10:05] So it all comes down to search engine optimization. Recency and consistency and relevancy, all work hand in hand when it comes to search engine optimization.
[00:10:16] So how recent was your post? How consistent are you posting and how relevant? Relevancy is all driven by the engagement that your post gets on a regular basis. So if you've got an email list of some sort and you launch a blog, by gosh, you better get ahold of those people, send them over to that blog post. That way it starts to build relevancy for all the search engines and sends even more traffic of people that are similar to your current audience. Pretty cool, right?
[00:10:48] Matty: Yeah, when I was looking through the, I think it was five contractors from Fiverr that you tried out for this experiment, whose prices ranged wildly. I want to talk about that in a minute, when we talk about the contractor part. But they were defining the services they offered based on words, focus keywords, topic research, references, and citations. And can you describe a little bit what each of those meant in the context of a blog and how you assessed their ability to deliver those?
Vetting Ghostwriters
[00:11:21] Dale: Well, obviously, writing an article just by itself is not enough. I mean, that's great. It's good to put out content, but it needs to have purpose. Because I want you to think of this like a casino. It's a bit of a gamble. You're obviously hiring somebody, so you're going to put your money into essentially like an avenue of marketing. We want to make sure that this is returning. And so the return of that money on investment, we want to make sure there's more visitors. How do we make sure there are more visitors? We have to make sure it's search engine optimized.
[00:11:53] So that's why you have to get on the same page with that freelancer about, okay, I want you to focus on two to three good keywords. Those three keywords will have some interrelated relevancy with each other. Knowing what those keywords are going to be comes down to you and your niche. So what is it that you're typically searching for on Amazon when you try to find your book? That could probably be one of many keywords that you can utilize. But having those keywords organically worked within a post makes all the difference.
[00:12:29] Simply putting that keyword once, isn't enough, but then putting it in a hundred times is too much. You have to find that balance. And this is where there's different plugins. Right now, the one that I use, or my team uses, one of them was Yoast, I know for sure. Oh, Rank Math was the other one and Rank Math is a hundred percent free. You can put it in there and you'll tell them what your keywords are, and then it'll be able to tell you whether or not it's appearing in there enough times, in order to actually become relevant for search traffic.
[00:13:01] But you want to make sure you're going through each one of these freelancers and making sure that they, first of all, have samples that you can read and make sure that they're actually writing some content that you can get behind. The next thing is, are they familiar with search engine optimization? Can they be able to do their own keyword research, because that actually is a big plus. If I can just say, hey, look, I'm in the Health and Fitness niche or Men Over the Age of 45. Could you be able to find me two to three keywords and work this into a blog post for me? And so that part's kind of nice. If you can hand it off to a freelancer who will do the keyword research for you, all the better. But coming to the table with that keyword makes life a little bit easier. So if you know exactly what you want, obviously the freelancer's going to better deliver that to you. So that's why it's like, you really want to look and see what they have to offer.
[00:13:55] There's other bells and whistles some people will put into it, like, I will give you unlimited drafts and things like that. I'm never impressed by that, because that usually makes me worry, because I'm like, why do I need unlimited revisions? If I see revisions, like two to three times, I'm like, okay, this person knows what they're doing, or they're awful cocky.
[00:14:17] Matty: Yeah. It's buyer beware if somebody saying unlimited, that just seems like a red flag to begin with.
[00:14:22] Dale: Yeah, it really does. It worries me because we're trying to save time. We don't want to be volleying back and forth with this freelancer. Like, well, you know, the second paragraph wasn't quite right, and you didn't implement at least three different times the keyword inside this post. It's just, it becomes messy. The times I did, I worked with these bloggers, I think I asked for one revision from one of them. Beyond that though, each one of them gave me pretty satisfactory stuff, and of course I went in, and I did a little bit of tooling with some of the copy in it. But beyond that, it was so minor that honestly, it was probably like one or two words that I went and fixed and maybe a sentence seemed a little awkward and I just corrected it.
[00:15:03] Matty: Yeah. Well, we talked about the criteria that I mentioned the words, focus, word, topic, research, references, and citations. The topic research, where you relying on them to do much research beyond what you gave them in the video?
[00:15:16] Dale: No, I wasn't relying on them, but I could have asked them to do that. For me at that specific time, I was working on a deadline based on the sponsorship with Fiverr, so I didn't want to muddy up the process and put in like, hey, you need to go look up this. And also it really got it to where they knew exactly the voice I wanted then. If they went and they did their own research and pulled up, say three or four or five, six articles and such, that's great for me because, granted, I have some sources that I can cite inside this, and it really aids in relevancy for this.
[00:15:49] And by the way, backlinks, reputable websites love when you provide a backlink to them as a cited source. And there's been times even where I've had companies reach out to me that I've cited before and they go, hey, we couldn't help but notice you did a backlink of our thing. Could you update it to this? It's really neat, because it's like networking without even trying, just putting that stuff up and they reach out to me. But does that kind of answer the question?
[00:16:12] Matty: Yeah, it sounds like the topic research, references, and citations is not something that you used actively for the experiment we're talking about because of the deadline you were under, but that depending on the expectation you set with the contractor, you would want to make sure that they were citing the sources they were going to, that they were referencing accurately and diligently.
[00:16:33] Dale: Yeah, exactly. And here's a little bit of a tip. When you're doing your blog posts, make sure that you're doing two inbound links, meaning that you're linking to two of your own blog posts. Now, starting out, it's going to be kind of hard to do that, but as you start to build out, you can retroactively go back and fix those blog posts to have two inbound links. The next thing is you're going to want to have two outbound links. Now it's not enough that you just go and grab some random hyperlink and associate it to your thing. Do your research.
[00:17:03] Let's say for instance, I say Kindle Direct Publishing is a great avenue, and then I just go ahead, and I hyperlink say, Kindle Direct Publishing to an article done by say The Good e-Reader. And it talks about all the pros and cons of Kindle Direct Publishing. By having that inbound traffic, it helps out, of course, raising more relevancy within my website. And the next thing is the outbound ones, again, the networking perspective side of things, but it also gets it to where search engines go, ooh, there's something important about this piece because it's tied in with all these other pieces. And if you have one piece that you're doing outbound traffic to, and it's already pulling really good traffic, then chances are very likely that's going to rub off on you to a certain extent. Bonus points, if you can reach out to that other person that has posted that article and get them to link to your post, oh, it's beautiful. Your search engine optimization is going to be off the charts.
[00:18:03] Which by the way, if you've been in this long enough, and I'm not sure if this has happened with you, Matty, that you will get someone reaching out to you. Hey, I will write a guest blog post for you. Well, it's a good reason why people will do that for free for you, because they are typically looking to write that piece for you, linked to relevant articles they've posted elsewhere that drives more engagement and more relevancy to that specific topic. Most times, by the way, anybody that reaches out to me for guest blog posts, I usually turn them down because I'm very, very specific on what I want.
Credit and Responsibility
[00:18:35] Matty: Yeah. And so the final question I had specific to blogs was how are you alerting the readers of your blog, if you are, that it was contributed to or written by a contractor?
[00:18:49] Dale: I do that right at the very closing of it. Some people would probably disagree with me and say, I should right out the gate, say this was ghostwritten by such and such. But with each one of those, I made sure I linked in the very bottom. Now there's a good reason why you want to do that because if the tone shifts differently from how you normally speak, then chances are very likely some people are going to go, whoa, there's a different tone of voice.
[00:19:15] Now, conversely speaking, can you go without crediting that person? Absolutely. You own that work a hundred percent. So it doesn't matter if Tom, Dick, or Harry wrote it, because you own it. So you could say, I wrote it. You don't necessarily need to come out and say that directly, okay. Don't ever, yeah, I wrote every single one of these posts, and you had them ghostwritten and such. And in that event, you just, it's a simple thing. I use WordPress. Or do you use WordPress at all?
[00:19:43] Matty: I use Weebly.
[00:19:44] Dale: Okay, so you use Weebly. My WordPress uses, I bet you Weebly probably has something built in to where, when you have a guest blog post of some sort, you can credit to an author within your dashboard. And what I'll do is I'll have, Ava, my assistant, she actually puts together profiles for each of the authors that will have their bio, their picture, and all the relevant links. So when the post is posted, WordPress automatically, based on what she selects as the author, will fill that out at the very bottom of the post.
[00:20:16] So instances like when I did the Fiverr one, you'll probably go look at those Fiverr posts. You'll see at the very bottom, this post was written as part of this project, blah, blah, blah, yackety, shmackety, and then below it, Dale Roberts' author bio. She's probably going, wait, I'm kind of confused. Yes, because I didn't put those Fiverr authors as an author profile through WordPress, we just went ahead and just defaulted over to me for the time being, because we just trust that people are going to be able to see that point of me saying, this was ghostwritten by these Fiverr freelancers.
[00:20:49] Matty: And I think it also highlights another important fact that regardless of if you have somebody helping you with the writing, you're responsible for the final product. So even if your fingers weren't on the keyboard, you better be ready to back up what you're posting. It's your blog.
[00:21:05] Dale: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:07] Matty: So that was what I wanted to talk about blog wise, although we're going to loop back to some things, but I'm wondering how specific this is to blog posts. And here's my reason. This is what I started thinking as I was reading your article. So for every episode of the podcast, I have a full transcript, I have show notes that link to my guests' website, social media posts, I link to other episodes if I referenced them in that episode. So as I was reading it, what I was thinking is that currently, I automatically generate a 90%, 95% accurate transcript from Descript. I actually have somebody help me on the cleanup. And I do certain things like highlighting key phrases, and the speaker names are identified in the timestamps. That's all done automatically.
[00:21:53] But what I started thinking is, I would love to take that material and have somebody else tidy it up, because a guest and I might be talking about topic A, we switch to topic B and then we switched back to topic A and it's fine in the conversation, but if I were writing it up as an article, I would rearrange things so that they were in better order. Have you considered using the contractors for that kind of work?
[00:22:16] Dale: That's actually a pretty smart idea. Have I considered it? No, no, that's actually really, really good idea. Right, right, because I have, I just started a whole new podcast interview series here and I imagine that would really, really be awesome to do that, and getting it to where we can segment maybe from an interview, we could probably have three different things we're talking about and we could probably turn that into three different posts altogether, if we wanted to, based on how varied the content was.
[00:23:17] Matty: Yeah, I think that there's such a move toward bite-sized pieces of content, and I've been trying to do that. Probably by the time this episode comes out, I will have announced that I have a playlist on my YouTube channel now called Two Minutes of Indy, where after each episode, I'll take six 2-minute snippets from the interview. And so I highlight the interview one day and then for the following six days until the next episode is available, every day, I'll post about a 2-minute snippet because two minutes and 20 seconds is all you can do on Twitter and post it natively on Twitter.
[00:23:49] And so I can see, just as you're suggesting that doing the same thing with textual content is great because I have a surprising number of people tell me that they do not listen to the podcasts, they read the transcripts. I'm like, really? And it is just once again, the danger of assuming everybody operates the way you do.
[00:24:07] But then I was thinking even beyond that. here was where I got hung up a little bit, because I think that the articles that you were having done for your blog posts were about 1000 to 1500 words, is that correct?
[00:24:21] Dale: Yeah, to my recollection. It's been a little bit since I did that project.
[00:24:24] Matty: Yeah. And my transcript, I looked at one of my recent transcripts, it was 8,000 words. So it would be comparably more expensive. In terms of the expense, talk a little bit, you had a wild range of prices that you were paying for these five test blog posts. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:24:47] Dale: The very first thing is, never assume that somebody who's cheaply priced is bad. Never assume though, that somebody who has a high price is going to be great. I found someone who wasn't the most expensive of them, two of them actually, I felt were really, really good. And their names are eluding my brain right now, but they were great. I didn't have to give them very much direction at all. There was nothing I needed to correct on their specific things because they deliver just as I expect them to.
[00:25:17] Matty: Just to give the listeners a sense, if I recall the range was from $5 to $150 or something like that.
[00:25:24] Dale: That seems about right.
[00:25:25] Matty: That's a big range. And I think the two that you liked were both, maybe in like the $80 to $100 range.
[00:25:33] Dale: They were the second and the third of the highest, because I think the highest was one that was recommended to me by my Fiverr contact. And she was like, hey, we use this guy for our Fiverr posts. And I was like, okay, that's enough proof for me, but I just happened to just go through. And I will spend, I would say an hour typically just going through Fiverr and searching. Because I'm looking at reviews, I'm looking at past comments, I'm looking at their deliverables. I'm looking at other gigs that they do and comments by those customers, because that's going to tell me, are they good with customer service? Are they good about delivering on time? Things like that.
[00:26:11] But I will tell you, I will tell you this, the $5 blog post, it was not worth it. First of all, she wrote everything in different fonts. She colored it all different, she put in some images that I don't know if she had the rights to. I'm just going, okay, what is going on here? And she closed out the post with, thanks for reading my post, byeeeee! And I, it was literally spelled B Y EEEEEE. Outside of me saying this right here, I have never in my life ever said anything like that to anybody, byeee! $5, not worth it.
[00:26:49] Now, there are other people out there that are $5 that are probably good, maybe, there's a good possibility, I'm hard pressed, if you find someone who's that good, please drop me a line because I will get on top of that. But man, it's all going to come down to just testing out maybe an option or two at first. So it's much like when you jump into Facebook Ads or Amazon Advertising, there's a little bit of a gamble factor involved, because you don't know the full process quite yet. But just going through a person's reviews, and if they've got a portfolio of some sort, so you can go and read what they've already done, that makes a huge difference, because you can go and read that and go, ho ho ho ho, no, no, no.
[00:27:34] And see, I think that was a problem I made with the $5 gig, where I was like, yeah, that looks good enough. It's horseshoes and hand grenades, close enough counts. I'm just going in and looking at this, but as far as what's the best range, it's just tough. It's just tough to say. It just depends on the type of content that you want written and the quality of content that you want done. And I understand that a lot of people can't spend $150 for a blog post and cross their fingers and hope that's going to start to open things up.
[00:28:03] When you look at something that's at a higher premium and you see me mentioning these types of things to you and you go, Dale, I am not making that type of money. Well, chances are very likely, I'm telling you to put a pin in it and come back to it later. There are other business owners though, that will watch that and go, okay, I don't have time to write a book, so I'm probably going to outsource that. I don't have time to do my website, I'm probably going to outsource for that. So there's some people who do have that discretionary expense to spend $150.
[00:28:30] But if you're new to something like this, start at the low end of things. I wouldn't recommend looking at the $5 case. Maybe look for something that's going to be, say $20 or more for something that's say, a thousand words. Your blog posts need to have some substance. I would recommend as a minimum having 800 words to as much as 1500 words. Include at least three to maybe four images, and each one of those images you want to have in the ALT text, your target keywords. So that way, it's another driving factor for relevancy.
[00:29:07] Matty: I would just throw my recommendation behind what you're saying about looking at people's history. I've done several gigs through Fiverr and have had pretty different, you know, from work that I just threw out and figured that was a lesson learned to some work that I loved. And what I found the commonality was in the work I loved on Fiverr and other platforms, I also use Upwork and Reedsy, and that track record, seeing that they've been doing it for a while, that they're specialized in the area that you're looking for. So I think that's important. As I recall, all of the people that you used from Fiverr advertised themselves as blog writers, they didn't advertise themselves generically as writers. So if focused on the area that you want, then that's good. And then, they've been at it for a while, they have happy other customers I think is key.
[00:29:52] Dale: Absolutely, couldn't agree more.
[00:29:55] Matty: Continuing on this route about what I could do with my content, really this podcast is all about answering my questions. Let's say that you have now collected a bunch of blog posts and you want to assemble them into a book. Is there any consideration legally or morally about doing something like that with the content that a third party has written for you?
[00:30:17] Dale: The biggest issue, well, I mean, there's going to be a lot of people out there if you're listening to this podcast and are outright against ghostwriting, I'm not trying to sell you on it. Honestly, I'm not going to be able to be the one who's going to convince you that ghostwriting is completely and totally ethical to be doing. But that's my opinion. That's how I feel about ghostwriting. Because at the end of the day, if something provides value to me, I don't care who wrote it. I am not so loyal to any one specific writer that I'm like, it must be this person. No, there are a ton of people out there that have had ghostwriters and put out fantastic books, put out fantastic blog articles and it makes no difference to me who wrote it.
Considerations for Content Reuse
[00:30:57] Dale: So if you end up taking this and turning it into a book is going to be the big question. And I will tell you that I've done this from experience. I did a book called "Gym Etiquette" and it was about a bunch of rules that are always, unspoken rules that are done in gyms, like dropping weights and groaning really loud and singing along to your favorite music, that type of thing. And I put them into blog posts that were funny. Yeah, I just, it was something that everybody can giggle and laugh about because everybody who's been in a gym in some capacity can relate to these things.
[00:31:27] And eventually I said to myself, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is enough for a good short book. But herein lies the problem. If I just grab this blog post and I just go and upload it to somewhere like Amazon KDP, you're going to run into some issues because then they've got crawlers, little web crawlers, that go around and explore the internet. And when they find text that exactly matches text of books that are inside their catalog, they're going to take umbrage. They're going to go, what are you doing? Why is this free, because you're selling it on our platform? They don't like that.
[00:32:02] So if you do go with using a blog post as a full-length book, what you're going to need to do is go back in. You're going to need to rework it, you're going to need to make sure that it's all tidied up. Maybe add some content or subtract some content but taking the same exact material and publishing it can put you into a position that isn't highly favored by Amazon KDP.
[00:32:27] Now let's just say, for instance, I'm a wide published author and I go to publish that wide. Chances are very likely when they discover that your content's free, they're going to send you a notice saying, hey, we saw your stuff for free, you're going to have to prove that you've got the right to this. So at that point, you have to prove that you have the copyright. No problem. Now, in the event that you can't, they're going to either take that book down or, worst case scenario, terminate your account. That's not good.
[00:32:59] Now, an extreme side of things, this is where you should not take it lightly. If you are taking those blog posts and you put it into an ebook and you enroll that ebook in the KDP Select program, now you've got a problem. Because you just agreed to them to exclusivity on their platform. And by saying you're going to be exclusive, that means anything electronically, this is not talking about print, not talking about audio book, anything electronically distributed should only be on Amazon's platform. So in the event that you do take a blog post and you go ahead, and you publish it over at KDP Select, that blog post better be gone and off your site before that even launches, because they discover that, you will have problems. Like it's not just a case of, hey, prove you have the rights. No, it's going to be like, you better prove you have the rights, and if you do have the rights, you're in violation.
[00:33:51] Matty: And that advice would hold regardless of who wrote the blog post. And that, I suppose that you need to be careful when you're examining the agreement that you have signed via Fiverr, that it enables you to use it, use that content in other ways. Do you know if your contracts would enable you to do that should you want to?
[00:34:14] Dale: With Fiverr, it's all inside their terms of service, you own whatever's distributed, unless it otherwise says within the gigs. So for instance, there are some times, and I don't like these gigs, where they will make your cover, and then they'll say, for commercial rights, you have to pay X amount more. I think that's rather skeezy, because what, am I going to just make a book cover so I can hang it up on my shelf or pin it on my fridge? That's stupid. But through Fiverr, anytime that you're buying a gig, as soon as you have approved that, it's a hundred percent yours.
[00:34:49] Now on the other platforms has been forever since I'd done Upwork and I've never done anything on Reedsy, so you need to read the fine print on each of those platforms, but to my recollection, Upwork, it's the same thing as Fiverr. As soon as that is done and you have approved it, you own 100% of those rights. You can distribute it however you wish.
[00:35:06] Matty: The Fiverr engagement that I was most happy with was that I wanted somebody to do some pen and ink drawings for me to use on merchandise. And because I wanted to do it on merchandise, I purchased the commercial license, which was actually only slightly more than the other license. But I think in her case, it's almost easier to understand, because my husband and I have also had the same woman do a picture of one of our dogs, which is never going to show up on merch, it's just for us to frame and hang on our wall, and you understand how that might be priced differently than, now I'm going to print this on a canvas tote bag and try to sell it to as many people as I can. Yeah, it's slightly different. I understand the rationale behind it in that case. In the case of a book cover, it is a little harder to understand.
[00:35:49] Dale: What, like, why am I having to pay for, of course I want to distribute this! Maybe some people just want to have a book cover that they do just want to hang on to, maybe it's something that will inspire them, and they can come back and buy the rights to the distribution. But to me, I think it's a rather underhanded way of doing things. And I'm not sure if Fiverr is aware of that happening on the platform. But for something like you, that makes sense.
[00:36:12] Matty: Yeah.
[00:36:12] Dale: When it's just something like my pop art in the background, I don't need to buy commercial rights to it, because I'm not distributing it anywhere else. I bought the pop art so it can hang up on my wall and I'm not going to plan on distributing it anywhere, so I don't see any reason to pay for that commercial license.
[00:36:25] Matty: Right. The Fiverr contractors that worked out well for you, are you continuing to do work with them? Do you see this as a long-term working relationship?
[00:36:34] Dale: Admittedly, there was a part of me that fooled myself into believing that I would work with the two of them. Corthoney, there we go. That was one of them, Corthoney, was great. And then the other one was a British fellow, I'm forgetting his name right now. Fantastic. I used him twice. I had the intent of continuing to work with them, but to be honest with you, I have so many plates spinning, that a lot of the blogging fell off to the side, and I haven't been able to focus on it as much as I can. And the old saying is, the man who chases two rabbits gets none. And between doing my podcast, doing my main channel, pivoting to fiction this year, I'm not sure if I told you about that yet. Managing my nonfiction, I have five titles ready to go. It's just one of those cases, I'm like blogging has been second priority on my list.
[00:37:21] And this is something I want to impress upon your listeners is, if now's not a good time, it's totally understandable. I get it. If you've got the finances, but you don't have the time to sit down and put these things together and manage those assets, then it doesn't make sense. So I don't want to be sitting here talking outside my mouth, go over and do some blogging, and then you're going to be like, wait, you did those posts a year ago. I will take that criticism to heart for sure. But please understand that there are so many aspects to my business and working with a team, that unfortunately trying to bring in two additional freelancers into the situation is only going to make matters worse and pile upon our already big, big plate of duties, chores, and projects.
[00:38:04] Matty: And you're already finding other ways to bring people to your content. A blog post on top of it is not as vital as it might be for some other people.
[00:38:10] Dale: Right. I'm fortunate that I have the YouTube channel for the main channel, and then I have the podcast channel because all roads lead back over to my website where the blog posts are.
[00:38:21] Matty: Did you get any pushback from the people who read those blog posts about if they noticed that it had been contributed to or written by the person from Fiverr. Any pushback there?
[00:38:30] Dale: None whatsoever. None. A long time ago, probably 2016, 2017, when I was talking about ghostwriting on my channel, there was a clear divide in the sand. There were some people that were just like, it is unethical, it's immoral, it should not be done, you're fooling readers into believing that that's your work. And then you have the other side of things where people were like, that's smart business. I lie on that side of things, and I can understand there might be some people that are just steadfast lovers of the craft of writing, and they feel like it's being imposed on when somebody else is doing the work.
[00:39:08] Now, I want everybody to think of this just for a second. Again, I'm not trying to sell you on ghostwriting. Just remember that some writers truly don't want that front seat. They don't want that spotlight. All they want is less risk and more of a payout. It's less of a risk for them to write that post for you than to do it themselves and put it on their website and cross their fingers and hope for the best. Yes, you take the risk, but they also get their payday.
[00:39:36] And even my writing coach for years was ghostwriting for many trad pub and indy pub authors. And she's a fantastic author. She just decided finally, you know what, I'm going to take a risk on myself. Little did she know that in her first year, she would become one of the top Kindle Vella authors on the platform.
[00:39:56] Yeah, it's amazing. So, you know, ghostwriters sometimes, it's not just a case of they're lazy or that they do terrible work or anything else like that. They just don't want that risk and they don't want to be in that spotlight. So they're going to give it to you.
[00:40:12] Matty: And I can direct people to episode 95, which was "Finding and Being a Ghostwriter with Rob Archangel and Mikal Keefer."
[00:40:20] Dale: Great episode, by the way!
[00:40:21] Matty: Oh, thank you. Yeah, you know, Rob of Archangel, Inc. And then Mikal is one of the ghostwriters on his staff. And it was very interesting, it was interesting to see like the management perspective and then the writer perspective on that topic.
[00:40:32] One last question for you and, tell me if you can't answer this without being very specific and bringing up screen share. So I described what I'm doing with the podcast. I have the transcript, I have links, I have show notes, I have lots of relevant keywords that just occurred naturally because of the topic we're talking about. How can I tell what benefit, if any, I'm getting from an SEO point of view for that? What I don't want to ask you to do is describe based on a particular website platform how to do it, but can you describe generically how you can find out what benefit you're getting there?
[00:41:04] Dale: What you're going to want to do is make sure that you have a plugin or a widget of some sort on your website. I don't know what Weebly is going to have, but I know WordPress has got things like Slimstat, that's going to be able to show you the analytics. It's a hundred percent free. You plug it on in there and you'll be able to see which posts get the most traffic, and by which term was sought after that they discovered your post. So that's where you'd be able to see all the magic. Weebly probably has, I'm sure, some type of a widget that tracks analytics as well but knowing where that traffic comes from and where they land and why they landed there makes a huge difference.
[00:41:40] Like I said, I think Slimstat is the one that I use. Just a search up anything that's going to show analytics on your website, so you know who your traffic is, where it's coming from and why.
[00:41:52] Matty: Great. As always, Dale, this was wonderful to talk to you. You are always a font of information and please let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do in line.
[00:42:01] Dale: SelfPublishingWithDale.com.
[00:42:09] Matty: An excellent name. Thank you, Dale.
Is using a ghostwriter for content something you'd consider and, if yes, what content would you give them--for example, Dale gave his ghost writers a video of him talking about a topic--and what type of content would you ask them to create--for example, Dale asked them to create a blog post?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
However, I don’t get notifications of comments posted here, which means I may miss some, and my website builder doesn’t enable commenters to respond to a specific comment, which makes it hard to engage in any kind of dialogue. So I’m recommending that you post any comments on YouTube. Just scroll to the top of this page and click the YouTube link to leave a comment on this or on any other aspect of the show—and to chat with your fellow creative voyagers!
