Field-tested techniques for content that stands out

Jim James (00:02.126)
Hello, welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we are going to Utah, which I think is in the Midwest of America, and we're gonna talk with a Digital Sharecropper. We're gonna find out exactly what a Digital Sharecropper is and why that name has come about. We're also gonna talk about content. We're gonna talk about how you can build your brand and a special formula for building blog posts that actually get carried and shared

by people beyond your networks. So lots of great value there. We're joined by Patrick Dawson, who is our Digital Sharecropper. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Patrick (00:40.967)
Thanks, I'm delighted to be here.

Jim James (00:42.922)
Well, we're delighted to have you here. And for those people that are listening, Patrick's actually wearing a very stylish trilby, which is fantastic. I'm a big fan of hats myself, and I wear one of those actually when I go out with my long coat. So Patrick, first of all, you have a very successful website called Digital Sharecropper.

You've got to tell us first of all, where that name comes from, because it's unique, it's catchy, but it's also a little bit anchored in history. So where have you got the name for your business from?

Patrick (01:17.843)
Well, the big thing comes where when I first got into digital marketing, people would reference this concept called digital sharecropping, and they always acted as though it was a terrible thing. And I looked into it and I realized that they were always afraid you were building your business on a platform that was going to disappear and you didn't own any of your content. But I saw it sort of like you mentioned with its roots in actual sharecropping where you'd have a sort of tenant farmer situation where they

someone without the funds to buy the land could work the land and share in the profits. And to me, a lot of what we do in digital marketing is we access these large platforms, social media, search engines, WordPress, things that we didn't build for a fraction of the cost and effort that it would have taken to create this platform on our own. And I see it as a good thing more so than this negative thing as long as obviously you're not building something that's entirely dependent on somebody else.

Jim James (02:10.494)
Yeah, and I love that. And also it gives you the flexibility. If you're renting, you get access to a much bigger platform than you could ever build in the time that it takes. And when you're finished, you can leave that platform and move on to the next platform or next place, can't you as well? So Patrick, I love that. And then currently your business is in content and content creation. But I'd love to talk to you then about.

Patrick (02:27.313)
Exactly.

Jim James (02:41.294)
your journey for getting noticed because, you know, as a show, this is about, you know, how to get noticed. And before we started recording, you just shared a lovely moment about you and your wife and which was kind of a trigger point for you about what it takes to get noticed and why that's important. Do you want to share that with us?

Patrick (03:02.407)
Sure. So maybe about 15 years ago, I took my wife on a date to this place called Medieval Times. It's one of those sort of event things you go on for a date where you participate, kind of like an escape room or something. But it's themed around the Medieval Times. There's knights who are jousting and fighting, and they seat you in a section, you know, based on you're rooting for the blue knight or you're rooting for the red knight. And there's this whole drama that plays out and the people waiting on you are calling you my lord and my lady and stuff like that. And our knight count...

came out to our section and he said, I have a rose for the fairest maiden. And I thought to myself, I'm sitting with the fairest maiden. I'm gonna get that rose. And so he looks up in the audience and I see everyone just flapping their hands, trying to make all this commotion to get noticed. And I thought to myself in the split second, if I do this like everybody else, I'm gonna be invisible. And so I decided to stand on my chair and do a big sweeping arms motion like this really slowly. And when he was scanning the audience, he immediately locked onto me

and he threw the rose right up onto our table. And it was one of those light bulb moments where it's, if you do what everybody else does, you're invisible. If you do something that's unique and genuine to you, you're gonna get noticed. So

Jim James (04:12.322)
Patrick, I love that story. It's a great story and a great really metaphor for marketing in general. Lots of people are waving and you're waving both arms rather than just one hand. So it's brilliant. And I'm sure your wife was very, very chuffed as well at getting the rose. She'll have been very delighted. Digital Sharecropper, you're really helping individuals, entrepreneurs to do branding and especially around content.

Patrick (04:27.645)
But yeah.

Jim James (04:41.29)
So I was happy that you wrote and very keen to have you on the show to talk about what do you think a brand constitutes? How does somebody go about building a brand? So let's talk about that first, Patrick, before we move on to your content formula and a tool that you've got, a platform that you use that actually takes your content and shares it amongst a community that shares it. So let's start with what makes a brand.

Patrick (05:09.027)
What people think of a brand, they're often thinking about a tagline and a logo and colors and things of that nature. But I see a brand really as it's an extension of you as a person, as the entrepreneur. And the first step, I think, is to set the right expectations. And a small anecdote I have is I was in a shopping mall down in Medellin, and my wife and I were looking for a place to eat. And we looked up and on the fourth floor, we saw this place that said fresh fruit. And we thought, oh, maybe if we're going to get some smoothies or something like that.

So we work through the escalators and go back and forth. We finally get all the way up there and it's a children's clothing store. And my expectations were that I'm getting a snack and then I'm totally on the wrong side of the mall for that. And so with a brand, you know what you're getting into. You wanna know what you're getting into. And so that goes against clickbait or any of these types of things. You don't wanna promise something that you're not delivering. And so if we start with, set the right expectations. Whatever you're going to be giving them, give them.

And I think that's obviously, I mean, for me, that's the first step is don't promise something you don't have. Don't try to oversell. You always want to over deliver. And that leads right into what I would say, how you implement that as sort of finding your own voice and not copying other people, you're going to have your own sort of slang jargon and your own view of the world that you've collected. I read this book, how to fail at everything and win big, I think is the title. And it talks about you collect this. These unique

mediocre skills throughout your life that seem to not matter. And over time, they all sort of interweave together to give you this, instead of being a big fish in a little pond, you're the only fish in the pond because nobody has all those skills that add up in that same way. So finding your voices, you're being authentic and not just repeating what you hear because you have something authentic and unique to say. And so that's, I think those are the first staples as far as having a unique brand identity.

Jim James (07:05.118)
Yeah, so that's interesting because many people can discount, can't they, their unique experiences. And how do you help somebody to determine, you know, so that they are authentic in their own space, but not so far out as to be sort of missing what most people are looking for because

one of the temptations in branding, a personal branding, is to try and fit in. Because socially, we're taught to fit in to kind of everybody wave, not wave your arms, because waving your arms could be seen as antisocial. So Patrick, how do you help people to feel comfortable with being different enough so that they stand out and not get left out?

Patrick (08:01.047)
As far as feeling comfortable, you are somebody unique with a unique experience. So you have to straddle that line of, I don't want to have to educate a market on something that's never existed before. So you've got to be in a space that other people are in. But you'll have some unique spin to it. It doesn't have to be something huge, but there's something different that you offer. Do I offer better quality? Do I offer better price? Do I offer...

Some sort of hands-on. There's something would just think of you use as a barometer Go to the places you shop the stores you go to What do you get from a different? You know grocery store? There's one by my house that The shelves everything looks very nice and polished and shiny and everything's always fully stocked and it's more expensive And then there's one that's you know a little bit I don't want to say shabby, but they don't pay as much attention to detail and they pay more attention to sales and they have a different clientele

And then you have other places where you go in and they're cheerful and they greet you and they small talk with you. And so it can almost, you start to see in real life, there's some car dealerships where they just, they let you alone, you know, the product speaks for itself and we're here to help. And then there's some where you go there and they attack you like a bunch of vultures. So it's, there's something unique you can offer. And if you're not comfortable with one method, you can be comfortable with something else. You don't necessarily have to be in your face going for the sale.

You can do the sort of, I'm going to inform you, and you're going to know that I know this product so well that that's going to draw you in. So you can find customers that line up with exactly what you're offering is my take on that.

Jim James (09:39.274)
Okay, nice. So you're sort of saying that something like groceries, right? There's already a market for that. You're not trying to create a market, but within the market, you position yourself a little bit differently. One of the aspects that you're very good at with Digital Sharecropper is you have a very active blog and

Patrick (09:45.936)
Right.

Jim James (09:59.194)
you write great content. And a challenge for many, many entrepreneurs, pretty much every entrepreneur is the writing or asset creation, whether it's the writing, the videos, because most entrepreneurs, most of us are not writers, right? We make something, we build something, we invent something.

Can you help us to understand an approach, a way that we can overcome some of the challenges of creating content and writing, Patrick?

Patrick (10:30.119)
Sure. Well, I think for starters, you might not be a writer, but you have a conversation now and then. You know how to talk. You probably know how to read. You probably listen to podcasts or audiobooks or watch television. So you know how to interact. And that's really all that writing is. It's just putting it into the written or the audio form, spoken word. So step one is you technically already are a writer if you can have a thought and then use words to explain that to somebody else. But

beyond that, what I like to do is come up with systems, because you want to take a lot of the guesswork out. So you don't want to have this decision fatigue that builds up with, did I use the right wording here? Did I use this? So you just have our formula, if I walk you through what we do for our blog posts. So I'll assume somebody knows how to outline a post and those type of things, like how to come up with your keyword and whatnot. But once you have the topic you're going to talk on, we start with our headline. And...

Jim James (11:15.231)
Yes.

Patrick (11:28.315)
we craft a headline that it stands out, so we compare it to what other people are saying. If everybody's doing a how-to post, we're gonna have to phrase it differently. If everyone's doing five ways to do this, if I say 10 ways, they don't think mine's twice as better. They just see generic number to do this. So you start with a headline that sort of will grab the attention, and it will be unique enough from what it's in there with. But then you don't want them to get to your blog and not have exactly, receive exactly what you told them in the headline.

And I know with headlines, you sort of have to make it a little bit salacious, a little bit of clickbait. So what we do is if you land on any one of our blog posts, we then have a four line intro, which sort of expands on the blog title and it tells them in this post, this is what you're going to learn. So we spell it out in the sentence form instead of just, you know, 60 characters. And then we say, using this knowledge, you'll be able to do this thing. So you, the headline draws your attention and then you get there and you say, okay, this is what I'm going to learn.

And this is how I'll be able to use it in my business. And then right after that, I put a table of contents that then shows them so they can look and say, oh, these five bullet points match everything. And so within 10, 15 seconds, a reader is gonna know, is this blog post for me or is this not? Because as much as you wanna bring people in, you also want to sort of gatekeep and make sure the wrong people aren't there. You don't wanna waste somebody's time. That's how you get negative reviews, that's how you get downvotes, stuff like that. So you want to set the clear expectations like I mentioned earlier.

And then with going through the post, you really need to deliver exactly what you said. And so I have sort of a formula on Digital Sharecropper. The posts are somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500. And on other blogs I work with, sometimes it's longer form content. And so it's just once you sort of figure out who your audience is, just try to have some sort of framework, almost like a content brief. And a good way to do this is people will have a Write for Us tab on their blog sometimes.

And even if you're not interested in writing for them, just follow up with them and see what their process is. Because often they will, some places that take writers, they give you, here's your keyword, here's your outline. Some of them say, one, two, three, go. And so you can start to feel like you find somebody who looks sort of reputable and has professional content, and they will sort of let you know what their standards are and how they walk through it. One of our blogs, we have this for other writers, and we have very specific email templates we send out, and we sort of walk them through the process so that

Patrick (13:55.003)
they, there's no guesswork. They have an exact, this is our format, this is our formula, this is the type. Is it something we want to be edgy or is this something we don't want any profanity? Is this something where we want it to be inspirational in your personal story? Is this something where you want it to be very just cut and dry, this is how to do something, sort of a how-to thing. And it doesn't matter my experience. So that's, when you get those things straight, the writing sort of takes care of itself in a sense. And then lastly, I just say, don't write and edit at the same time.

Put out a poor first draft and then take some space, take a day and then do the editing. That's the biggest thing I found that helped my writing was when I would write and then I'd finish a paragraph and then wanna go back and change something. So rather than do that, you just put it out and I know it's gonna be garbage. I know I'm gonna get to the end and I'm gonna wanna rephrase it, but in a different frame of mind, I can come back. The editing mind and the writing mind, they use different parts. And so to try to do them both, it hinders both.

Jim James (14:37.454)
Thank you.

Patrick (14:53.507)
So you end up with less words on the page and less quality overall.

Jim James (14:56.674)
Patrick, that's really, really good advice. And if people want to find magazines or papers to write for, these guidelines then are in effect giving instructions to us. And I notice on your website with your blogs, that you have, as you say, this nice introduction, then it's a more reading and then a summary of what people are gonna get from the article. And then you break it down into

numbered sections and you have infographics included as well. So you give a very structured approach to your content. Why do you take that approach as opposed to maybe more sort of a stream of consciousness? You know, I'm writing this, it's creative and you should like it approach.

Patrick (15:50.799)
I guess it's really a matter of personal taste. I function better under what I considered constrained creativity. Maybe it hails back to my real estate days when I was remodeling existing houses rather than building new houses. I felt like a clean slate was just too much to deal with. Whereas if I have these constraints, I can work within those and find the best sort of solution. So the reason I do it structured, part of it is that it's a little bit more informative content rather than any kind of inspirational or personal. And I find that

if you're going to inform somebody, there's a very good formula of letting them know what they're going to get, introducing them to the concept. And I personally like to throw an infographic in, because it's sort of the Cliff Notes. They are often more shareable. You can get a little bit of search traffic through the Image tab and stuff. But also, it breaks it down into a nice graphical, because obviously people learn sometimes they can take something in better if it's through graphics versus visually versus reading or audio. So I like to have that as well,

a summary, so when you hit the main point of this is what I'm talking about, here's your infographic that walks you through it with just a couple little words here, and then after that I do the bullet points. And it's more often than not numbered, but not always. I just find that it's easy to, if you know that you have six things you're going to learn, you can, it's sort of subconsciously, it's like, okay, I'm partway through it, and you know where you are in the post. And I also, if you've noticed, as you scroll down, there's a little bar across the top of the browser that slides across to kind of show you your progress.

Sometimes you'll get on a page and you're thinking, is this a 5,000 word essay or is this a 200 word? What am I getting into? I think all these things that you can walk the reader through, like this is what you're going to expect. At the very top of mind, I put a reading time, like this is a five-minute read. I don't do that on all the blogs. But it's about that setting expectations. Also, for Digital Sharecropper, it works very well for a structured thing, but on some of our other blogs,

Jim James (17:37.462)
Right.

Patrick (17:47.215)
while it's still structured, it is a little bit more free flowing, like you say. So I think it really depends on your niche.

Jim James (17:49.926)
Okay. That's really fantastic. And in terms of sharing content, what do you do there, Patrick? Because people can write an article, but if they don't have traffic to their website, maybe they put it on LinkedIn as a newsletter, maybe on Substack or a medium, Reddit. Any tools you can introduce us to that you use to help with that distribution?

Patrick (18:19.727)
Yeah, I have several tools. I know we probably would mention Missing Letters, a very simple one to implement. I use another tool as well, but it's a little bit more advanced and it takes a bit more setup. But Missing Letters, what I use to, it pulls your RSS feed and you set up these sort of post templates, which is just a quote bubble or something with your logo in it. And with your RSS feed, it will know when you put out new content. And it will pull a handful of sentences from your blog post.

And you can just add those, and it'll craft. What I usually do is the 12-month template, where it shares them, nine posts over the course of 12 months. And they're all unique posts. So this isn't I'm making the same, it's my featured image in the title, and I just keep resharing it every week. So often it drips out a new version of it, or a new sentence, maybe a slightly different call to action, or a different image from the post. And that's how you can.

actively do it and also they have this curate library where people in the same niche as you they will want to keep their social feeds full and if you have a good piece of content it often will get shares some of mine get over 100 shares when I put them in that library and that's where a lot of my shares come from is just by putting them in that library and other people sharing them and getting a lot of exposure that way.

Jim James (19:34.222)
Nice. And do those have links back to your original site so they give you back links or some kind of a connection to you in the first place?

Patrick (19:42.383)
Yeah. Well, it sends the social signals. It is your link. You can use their shortened link if you want, their analytics, which I do use. But yeah, they are sharing your post, exactly. It's not, they're not sharing, you're getting the actual link on their social feed when they share it.

Jim James (19:58.018)
That's wonderful. A really nice way of building backlinks, which has been something that I've been struggling to think about how to do. Is there something, Patrick Dawson, over there today in Utah that you think doesn't work? I always like to ask something that doesn't really work when it comes to getting noticed.

Patrick (20:22.095)
I think the biggest thing just kind of calls back to being authentic and kind of you're wanting to stand out. And so much of when people are trying to build a business, they obviously want to model other people and see what has worked, but they often fall into the trap of just copying it instead of making it their own. So you're writing a post, but you're writing using someone else's formula, or you're doing social shares, but you're using somebody else's the way they kind of present their graphics or any number of things. They're not...

They're not using their own. You're writing a post, but then you're adding a quote that you wanna share, and it's somebody else's quote. You put Ralph Waldo Emerson in your thing, and people like his quotes, but it's not quote from you. So if you read your post, you probably have something in there you could use as the quote that you share. It's these type of things that you think that they're moving you forward, but really, you're just, you're doing it like the other people. You're just waving your hands in the exact same way, and when you're looking through this sea of content, yours doesn't stand out at all. And so obviously, stuff

like a tool like Canva, a lot of people use it. It's very affordable. Maybe think about using a different tool that has different templates that everybody isn't using. It's these little things, you're still making an infographic, but you're using a tool that not everybody's using so that their templates will look a little bit different. It's just these tiny little tweaks on things where your blog post is just your colors, your branding, how you've built your pages looks just a little bit different so it's not just a copy.

Jim James (21:50.114)
That's really great advice. You're right about Canva because now on YouTube, you see basically everyone's using what looks to be Canva templates, including me. Patrick Dawson, if there's one piece of advice, if it's not just the counter to the being a bit different, but if there's one piece of advice that you'd give with your experience as Digital Sharecropper on getting noticed, you've shared with us what you think doesn't work, what do you think does work?

Patrick (22:22.767)
think it calls back to on one of the temples to Apollo in ancient Greece there was a inscription on the front that said know thyself and for me that is the that is how you stand out it's sort of an indirect approach where it's not a tool or a technique it's you know what your life experience is you know what your strengths are you know your risk tolerance as an entrepreneur you're gonna have a lot of risk so you know all these things about you know you're what you've sort of developed

and how you've developed as a person over time. Use that as your number one asset. Don't discount any of that, because you don't have experience in whatever this new field is. You have experience somewhere. You've had another job, you've had certain relationships, you've had interactions. These all add up, like I was mentioning earlier in that book. All these skills that seemingly don't add up, they all add up, and it's something that then it makes you truly unique, and being authentic to that, and playing to those strengths, I think, is the biggest thing you can do to stand out.

Jim James (23:19.53)
Patrick, well, thank you so much. And it's been a pleasure to chat to you and hear about your approach with authenticity, but also take you a little bit of a twist, waving your arms and not just shaking your hand. And as you said, you become invisible if you're just doing what everyone else is doing. And I think that's a wonderful, wonderful comment that we can use to quote you. If you wanna find out more about you, Patrick Dawson, how can they do that?

Patrick (23:42.479)
Indeed.

Patrick (23:50.771)
You can find everything on digitalsharecropper.com. That's where I have all my work.

Jim James (23:54.134)
That's extremely tidy. Patrick, thank you for joining me and my fellow entrepreneurs today.

Patrick (24:01.499)
Thank you so much.

Jim James (24:01.898)
So we've been all the way to Utah to talk with Patrick Dawson and digitalsharecropper.com. You can see some wonderful blogs and you can enjoy the content themselves, but also you can certainly learn from the structure and his approach. And as in Patrick, just how considerate he is in all aspects of his business is also an inspiration. If you found this inspiring and useful, then do please

give it a review on your player, really, really helps me. And follow the show because I have every Tuesday and Thursday, amazing guests come on and sharing their insights, which are all here to help you overcome the challenges of being an entrepreneur and getting noticed for what you do. My name's Jim James. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.

Jim James (25:02.524)
Okay.