Content marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Digital Marketing – oh my!  Where should you begin, what should you do, and how do you get the most out of your limited resources?  SEO is changing and the algorithms are becoming more human.  So how do you capitalize on it?

In this episode of The Summit Lorraine and Kyle discuss:

• How marketing is becoming more like sales
• Using content to create powerful SEO
• Picking the right questions to answer
• Why powerful SEO and content isn’t as hard as “techy’s” make it

TRANSCRIPT

Kyle Hamer: 0:00

Welcome to The Summit. A podcast focused on bringing you the knowledge and insights for industry leaders. I’m your host Kyle Hamer, and I’m on a mission to help you exceed your potential. As a sales guy, turned marketer , I am passionate about building sustainable businesses. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 20 years , it’s like you won’t find it overnight growth scheme, a shortcut to success or a way to hack yourself. Nope , success is the by-product of hard work, great relationships and deep understanding done over and over. We’re here to help you unlock that success with some secrets from other people, one conversation at a time. Hello, welcome to The Summit. I’m your host Kyle Hamer. And today I’m here with our guest Lorraine Ball. Lorraine . Welcome to the show.

Lorraine Ball: 0:42

Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

Kyle Hamer: 0:45

Uh , we are to Lorraine is the head honcho, ringleader, top cat and big dog over at Round Peg square hole. Is that right?

Lorraine Ball: 0:55

It’s just Round Peg.

Kyle Hamer: 0:57

Why, how did the extra part he does? It’s a, it’s a digital agency focused on making life better, right?

Lorraine Ball: 1:06

Absolutely.

Kyle Hamer: 1:07

Can you give us the , uh, the ten second overview about you or a 15 second overview about you and , um, how you got to be where you are today?

Lorraine Ball: 1:16

So the ten second overview, I spent 20 years in corporate America feeling like a square peg in a round hole, thus the name I started Round Peg 18 years ago with the idea that I was going to create someplace that I fit. And that’s exactly what Round Peg is. It is about finding individual solutions for clients and these days that means using digital marketing to help them grow.

Kyle Hamer: 1:43

That’s fantastic that you did a good job on keeping that to 15 seconds. Um, today we’re going to talk about the power of the question and how using search engine and content-driven SEO will , uh , change your business. And this is something that’s been really heavy on your, on your mind has been at the forefront of what you’ve been working on, what the heck is content driven SEO.

Lorraine Ball: 2:08

So this goes back , um, uh, maybe a decade when everybody was running around with all of these black hat tactics, where they were embedding links in weird places. And it was all about just driving as many links as you could to your website. And it really didn’t matter whether it was good or bad, and people were trying to gain the system. And I looked at this and I said, you know what? That doesn’t feel right for me. It, it, it’s creating this situation where we’re getting a lot of traffic, but we’re not getting good traffic. We’re not getting high quality traffic to our website and to our clients sites. And I said, there has to be a better way. And my solution was, you know what? We’re going to create content on websites, that answers questions. We’re going to start blogging. And we’re going to have a lot of great information out there. And search engines are going to find, and I have to admit, I, I probably shouldn’t have smiled as much as I did, but as Google started rolling out, algorithm changes, Panda and penguin that really emphasized the content of the website and they haven’t eliminated links, but they’ve really downgraded them in terms of their importance in the algorithm. And it’s become much more about answering questions and creating a content rich site that contain the keywords, but also good information. And we’d been doing that all along. So that’s fundamentally where my attitude on content driven SEO comes from.

Kyle Hamer: 3:47

That’s fantastic. So when you say content though, I mean the big the world of contents, this giant stratosphere. And so when you say content, what do you mean?

Lorraine Ball: 3:57

So what I mean is information that answers the questions that prospective customers have when they’re trying to buy from you. It starts with the written word, but it doesn’t end there. You certainly want to have great keyword, rich pages with, you know, 600 to a thousand words where you can, and then you want to have pictures and those pictures need to be named. I can’t tell you how many websites I, I get on the back of, and I look in the media library and it’s JPEG one, JPEG two JPEG, three JPEG, four that’s, that’s absolutely useless because nobody goes to the internet and types in JPEG. One , what they’re looking for is they’re looking for a picture of a gorilla at the st . Louis zoo, or they’re looking for a picture of an air conditioner filter. And so every picture on your website, you need to think about that as content and have it appropriately named content is audio files like, like podcasts or video files, like a video recording of this content is any information that answers a visitor’s question.

Kyle Hamer: 5:16

Yeah. It’s interesting that when we talk about content and it’s answering questions and then people don’t don’t think about that, how do you identify what the questions are that somebody , somebody who’s looking for? Like , what’s , what’s the process for somebody who wants to get into content of, of starting to identify what the right thing is to put on the pictures of the audio files or the videos or on their website.

Lorraine Ball: 5:38

So I think there’s a couple of things. Number one, you need to sit down and think about the questions that your customers are asking you every day. If you’re in business, you are answering questions in sales presentations in every time the phone rings and you pick it up and start making a list of all of those questions and start looking at that list of words and figuring out what are the commonalities, what are the questions that come up over and over again? And then you want to kind of divide them into several categories, because there are different questions that people have at different points in the buying process. When, when they’re just starting out, they’ll know what they don’t know. You know, if you sell a product that people only buy once in their lifetime or twice in their lifetime, there’s a steep learning curve where they go from, I don’t even know what this is to, okay. Now I know what it is now. How do I decide between the different brands now, where do I go to buy? And those different categories can be defined , um , under this heading of searcher intent. And the first category are kind of the information questions, the general, and they start with words like how, what, when kind of that, that reporter journalism , um, kind of phase, I bet, you know, if you think about your business, you probably have a few of those searcher questions that pop into your head that , that people will , will type when they’re looking for you.

Kyle Hamer: 7:24

Sure. Well, and , and, you know, thing , I think that’s interesting is , is when you start thinking about starting with the question, it’s really interesting. Cause that’s the opposite of, if you build it, they will come, right? It’s it’s you , you, a lot of, a lot of owners, entrepreneurs and businesses will say, Oh, I built this great thing because I saw this space in the market, but they don’t have any way of turning that into what question is the market asking? Or what problem are they trying to solve?

Lorraine Ball: 7:51

Absolutely. So, you know, you, you really kind of have to try to, instead of shoving your product there, it’s almost like there’s this highway that’s whizzing by. And instead of trying to build an off-ramp, you need to jump into the middle of the road. And Sometimes it is , um, you know, and , and I’m going to go back to the , the other parts of searcher intent, because I think they are , they really help you kind of frame this idea of questions a little bit more is , um, the second piece is, is navigation. Somebody is searching and they’re like, you know, they , they start getting out and talking to friends and you’re going to buy, you’re going to buy a new car or you’re going to buy, you’re looking for a painter for your house. You don’t paint your house every week. So you get on social and you’re like, Hey, anybody know a good painter. And so about your people give you names. And now you’ve got this list of names. What do you do you go to, and you start typing in each of those names, because what you’re trying to do is navigate to the websites of those individual companies. So if your first questions are the information, second questions are very often navigational, where is cornerstone painting ? You know, are they located near me? What do people say about

Speaker 4: 9:18

Them? The third

Lorraine Ball: 9:21

Category are , um, are much more tightly focused, their commercial investigation. Now you’ve got these two products, Apple and PC. And so now you want to start doing some comparisons, which is better, an Apple or a PC. Well, sometimes it boils down to what are you trying to do? So then the questions become more refined, which is better for graphic design, which is better for gaming, which is bad . So you get those kind of X versus Y. And then the last one is transactional, which is really getting down to, I want to buy this, where do I go? You know, is there a , uh , Mazda dealership near me? Those are those transactional. It’s also, where can I find the best price for what’s the average price for how much should I pay for? So now you’ve got these four categories. Now what you want to do is you want to go to Google and have you ever gone ? And , and it’s almost like Google is reading your mind. You get halfway through a question and three or four different questions pop up.

Speaker 4: 10:37

Oh yeah.

Lorraine Ball: 10:40

Those questions are driven by , um, the Google algorithm. And this is an amazing piece of technology. When you realize how many questions and how many searches they answer every single day. And every time they have a search and they categorize all the things they presented and which ones people clicked on, and that is constantly being updated and they categorize the searches and the refinements on the searches. We, you can capitalize on that too, because if you go to Google and you type in your question, you are not looking for the answer, what you are looking for are related searches. What else are people talking about when they get that first question? So now you take your first line of questions and now you see all these variations.

Speaker 4: 11:40

And as

Lorraine Ball: 11:41

You open windows and check some of those other searches, you can build pages and pages of potential questions that you can create content around. So can build a bunch of questions,

Kyle Hamer: 11:54

But how do I know which ones are the most important or how do I, how do I pick where to start? Cause it sounds to me like, I mean, I’ve, I’ve done some Google search and in my day, and you only get, you know , like 59 million answers to your question. So I’d prefer not to be, you know , uh , result number 58 million, 999,000 . Like, how do I get, how do I, how do I navigate to what I should create, where it should create and what the con like where to focus my content effort, because I don’t have unlimited resources.

Lorraine Ball: 12:27

So I think one of the things that people get hung up on is what’s the very best word or phrase. And what I want to let, let you know, is that is as diverse as the human experience every single day. I don’t know . I think that I, the last time I checked, there were three and a half billion searches yesterday, yesterday 3.5 billion. Okay. Of that somewhere around 15% were new. They were searches that had never happened before. Exactly. That way. Think about that. Every single day, there are millions of questions being asked that have never been answered. So it’s not about it . It’s , it’s not about finding the right word. It’s about answering this question. Well, because if you look at that question and you think to yourself, you know what, when I talk to customers, they have that question answering. My guess is you probably already have. My guess is you have an email in your outbox that you have already sent to somebody where you had answered that question, take that email and make it a blog post, make it a podcast and promote the crap out of it. There is no one right answer. There’s no one magic bullet and end when you’re, when you’re building a content driven strategy. Yes, you can go to Google search console and you can go to your Google analytics and you can compare and see which one is microscopically better. Or you can spend that time just writing another great piece of content. The other thing I recommend that people do is look at where you’re winning. Look at the pages on your website that are already getting traffic and ask yourself, what question is that page answering? Why is it getting attention? And you know, what find ways to expand on that topic, either adding additional content to that initial page or by creating related pages, that link , um, invite other people to comment on that age and to share ideas and information. Um, a few years ago, just like with Lynx , um, there was a period of time where everybody thought a few links are good, more links are better, more links are better, more links are better. And it was this treadmill and the same thing with blogging. Oh, you know, you gotta be in 2010, I was writing seven blog posts a week just for my site. Not even counting my customers writing, I was burning up the pages. And I discovered that if I cut back to five, it was okay. Um, if I cut back to three, it was okay. And then I realized that instead of writing more, I have over 4,000 blog posts on my website, many of which haven’t seen the light of day in six or seven years, but they’re good posts instead of writing a new blog post, go back to your old content and refresh it, add a paragraph that answers a related question, add a audio file, add a new picture. And then, and this is really important using the Google search console. This is the one bit of techie thing I am going to really advocate for using Google search console. Go ahead and re Windex the page. It’s an easy way to tell Google, Hey, we got new stuff here, take a look at this page again, created , create new graphics to share it on social media and repromote it don’t change the date. Don’t, don’t pretend this is brand new acknowledge. You know what? We were brilliant a decade ago and we anticipated exactly what was going to happen today. And so this blog post is still valid and, or, you know what we wrote this a decade ago. And while I liked this part of it, these things have changed. So looks in the comments in red, that address what’s happening in 2020. And then we actually have a running spreadsheet that we use kept for the last, I think I’ve been doing it about a year and a half now. And so I have a list of all the blog posts that we’ve updated and what’s fun is they’re not in any particular order, but if I update a blog post and there’s a link to another blog post, then I update the post I linked to. And then I update the post I linked to there. And so I’m actually moving through my, the way Google would making sure that everything along the way is updated

Kyle Hamer: 17:55

Well that’s, I mean, that’s fantastic advice and, but not, everybody’s got 4,000 pieces of content and you know, you talk about , uh, identifying the question and creating content, you know, getting started as important. How did you, how did you find inspiration or find focus for, for being okay with creating the first post or the first podcast or the first fit ? Like how do you get over that first level of fear and trepidation of, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Lorraine Ball: 18:28

Um, couple of things, number one, you need to think of the internet. It is in a way the internet never forgets, but in, in a way the internet is a lot like , um, sand on a beach. You go to the beach on Monday morning and you build a sand castle and it’s not all that good, but you smile because it makes you happy. And you know what happens on Monday night, the waves come and they wash it away because it’s, it’s swept away in a sea of new content . So then you go back out there on Tuesday and you know what? You build it again because it’s a beautiful day and you got time. And now you do some things that you didn’t do on Monday. And you know, what’s happens on Tuesday night, that wave comes and it comes and it comes and it comes. So you have to be comfortable with the idea that it has to be good, but it doesn’t have to be, you’re not writing the next great American novel, you know what, you’re right . You’re sharing a piece of information, something that, something that you know, that somebody else does it and not everybody who reads it is going to think you’re brilliant. It’s okay. Invite your mom to read it. She’ll like it. Um, but start putting it out there. Well, you can go back and listen to some of the early, more than a few words, podcasts, and, you know, my show has been going on for a decade now. Um, I had some really great interviews with some really crappy audio, you know , and I had some really good audio with really bad interviews and I really didn’t know what I was doing. And I didn’t understand kind of the rhythm of the show or, and I didn’t really have a plan. I mean, today I have a plan. I know what my show is about. I know what I’m trying to accomplish that. Then I was just shoving a microphone in people’s faces and saying, Hey, can you talk to me? That’s okay. Really? Okay.

Kyle Hamer: 20:31

I think you’re right. I mean, I think, I think one of the things that people don’t appropriate enough is his grace or forgiveness in what you’re creating, right? Like it’s like, well, I have to be type a super perfect and everything we put out the door has to be the encyclopedia, but the encyclopedias got dated in and went away, look at Wikipedia. How often does Wikipedia get updated with new content? Right.

Lorraine Ball: 20:55

Well , you know, and I think there’s a difference between your web copy the, your home page, your product description that has to be tight. It has to be perfect. Your blog is disposable content. It will come and go give yourself permission to accept. And if you see a post that’s starting to get a lot of traffic, go back and clean it up, add to it, refine it, spend your time focusing on the things that people care about, not the things that you care about unless, and here’s my one caveat, unless that page is not relevant to your mission. Um, we wrote a blog post seven or eight years ago on how to set up a Dropbox folder. At the time we were using Dropbox with a lot of our clients and that blog post, even though we wrote it publicly was really designed for our customers. I wasn’t in the business of Dropbox consulting. I didn’t want to be in the business that blog post gets traffic every week, every week now, not as much anymore, but there was a period there where we would have questions on our contact form. I’m having trouble with my Dropbox. What do I do next contact Dropbox. You know? And so it’s not a , it’s not a bad blog post. I keep it up, but I’m not going to write any more on that topic. I’ve done. I’ve done as much as I can on that page to link to other pages that I think people who read that are interested, the truth is that page has got a really high bounce rate. People come, they company information and they leave because they’re not looking for a digital agency. They’re looking for information on Dropbox. And so every now and then you just have something like that. It’s okay, but don’t make it your life’s work. Unless of course you want to be in the business of consulting on Dropbox

Kyle Hamer: 23:09

Or just getting traffic that doesn’t matter. Right.

Lorraine Ball: 23:11

Or getting traffic that doesn’t matter. Yeah.

Kyle Hamer: 23:14

Well , you know, when we, when we were doing our prep call, we were talking a little bit about this. This idea of marketing is becoming more and more entrusted with the , um, the part of sales that most organizations aren’t necessarily thinking about or comfortable with. Right. There used to be a pretty big divide where it was, I have advertising marketing. Marketing was for the bigger companies that either had shows or had brochures. Then like they had some other form of cataloging to get those out there. And then they had their sales team and the sales team. They did everything in between. What are you seeing happening in the buyers journey or somebody’s somebody going through? Why is content so important to selling

Lorraine Ball: 23:59

Well, content fills in the gaps for the salespeople, content warms up the sale. Uh, he was a statistic, something like 57% of people. And please don’t quote me and say, well, Lorraine, you said 57 and it’s, you know, 49, it’s a high percentage of people who have already made up their mind before they pick up the telephone. They already know they’re going to buy from you. Unless of course you do something just horrible on the phone. And the reason is that you have put enough content out there, you’ve put enough information on your website and an email. And in social media that people feel like they know you before you have that conversation. So on the one hand, content brings much more prepared customers to the sales conversation. But the other thing that content can do is it can become a salesman’s best toolkit . And by that, I mean, you have this killer conversation with a prospect. I mean, you answered every question everything’s rocking and rolling, but at the end of the call, they’re like, yeah, I need to think it over. Or I need to talk to two or three other people. And as a sales person, you kind of like gray because you know that they’re not going to be able to sell whatever it was. You sold them as well to their management as it would be if you could have that conversation. But sometimes you can’t. Um, and so that’s where content comes in again, because now the sales was like, great. You know what, let me send you a recording of this conversation. Let me send you an a three minute video with a summary of what we do. Let me send you our brochure, a link to our website. Something that you can noodle around with, take back to your management team, you know, play with one of my, I’m going to say this and half a dozen people are going to copy me, but what the heck I did it first? Um, we have a kickoff guide. Uh, when we start a web project with a new client, we have a bunch of questions that we ask them. So if I’m talking to somebody and I think that they are legitimate, you know , I think this is going somewhere. I will send them a version of that. That’s simply called a web planning guy. And I’m like, you know what? Take this workbook. I know you’re thinking about a website, whether you hire me or somebody else answer all of these questions, cause it’s going to prepare you for that conversation. Well, after they’re done working on a workbook, that’s 10 pages long from Round Peg. I close a lot more of those sales. I don’t close all of them. Sometimes they take my workbook and they go somewhere else. It happens. But that tool, that piece of content that keeps them in touch keeps me front and center while they’re planning. Their next step is really powerful. And that’s where content becomes a sales person’s tool.

Kyle Hamer: 27:23

Well, you know, I think the thing that’s interesting about what you’re saying there is , is you’re still talking about somebody that’s in that. Uh, I think you said commercial investigation phase, right? There’s somebody that I know I have a problem and I’m trying to solve something in , in what I’m seeing more and more of is, especially in SEO is, is you have , um , groups that are out there to like, Hey, we’ll build you 35 billion backlinks or we’ll we’ll, we’ll, we’ll drive a bunch of traffic to your site. And the question is for how long, the other side though, the group that I feel like is doing SEO really well is , is when I bring somebody in I’m really good at getting them to nod their head. Yes. Whether it’s through a podcast and you’re like, Oh yes, I really agree with what Lorraine is saying here. Let me go check out our blog. Oh wow. What Lorraine and team aRound Peg had to say about this. I really, really agree with. I like what , the way they’re thinking. Oh, wow. Yes, yes, yes. Right. And it used to be, you had to talk to a sales person for them to have that level of engagement or conversation because they were trying to figure out where you are at and yet with, with content today, if you’re doing it right in the diversity is , um, the diversification of information is, you know, not just one lane only you can catch people a whole lot earlier in the sales conversation. And it sounds to me like in , in many cases, you’re almost delivering buyers, people that are showing up with a credit card and saying, Hey, I want to hire round, Round Peg. W why is it taking so long for marketing organizations or even a company to adopt this, like, gosh, that I just want you to, like, if you could just line up a bunch of people with credit cards, ready to buy what I have to offer Lorraine, that’s what I want. So why is this so hard?

Lorraine Ball: 29:07

Well, because , uh, some of that is making that shift between mass messaging and personalization, acknowledging that not everybody is going to come in through that same channel. And this is a hard thing for a lot of businesses to get their head around because it takes, this takes work. You have to be willing to divide and subdivide and subdivide your customers. You have to create multiple channels. You can’t create one great big funnel and push everybody through it because what happens is too many people drop off too quickly. You have to be prepared when you put a hamburger in front of someone that some people are going to go, you know what, I’m a vegetarian. And as they start veering off, you gotta have a mushroom burger. And then as they start veering off, cause they don’t want to have carbs. You have to have a salad with tofu, you know , uh , down that path. It’s pretty far away from that original hamburger that, that that’s your , your core, bread and butter, but you got to have those side messages and the, well, yeah, the only way, the only way I know to get to those side messages is to spend a lot of time asking questions, watching what happens, spending as much time on the customers that don’t hire you as the ones that do , um, you know, looking at when do people unsubscribed to your newsletter, which campaigns just made them say, you know what too vague , uh, you need to give people the option to, instead of sending and , and this is work, it’s easy to send one newsletter to everybody. Whether it’s every week or every month, it’s a lot more work to create an SEO campaign and a web design campaign at a new business startup campaign and have all these campaigns running and have people opting in and out of individual lists and making sure that people don’t end up on too many of them. Cause you’ll burn them out. It takes work. And individually we’re all very industry as collectively, as a , as a population will lazy. And the path of least resistance is to create one message and just figure it’s going to work for everyone. And it doesn’t

Kyle Hamer: 31:47

Well, you know, it , it, it, it’s interesting. It’s almost like what I hear you saying is that, you know, organizations are not afraid to invest in, in multiple bodies to go carry new messages into different places. I’ll go hire five sales people because that’s the path of least resistance. And they’ll do the hard work for me versus doing the hard work myself or, or partnering with a group like Round Peg and doing the hard work of creating the content that does the work of the five salesman and only needing one person or two people to collect the business and to convert them into paying customers.

Lorraine Ball: 32:24

I also think that a lot of businesses think that when they hire an agency or, or somebody in house, Oh, we have a marketing manager, he’s got it. She’s got it. That everybody else can kind of just go back to business as usual. You can’t because your customer service team, your sales team, your longtime employees, these are the people that have heard the questions for a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years. And if your marketing team internal or external does not have access to that knowledge base, they’re going to spin their wheels. And if those people are not committed to giving feedback to saying, Hey, this sales letter doesn’t work. This drip campaign doesn’t sound like me, this, this blog post , um, you know what? I just I’ve had this question five times. Can we write a blog post about if they’re not engaged in the process, it’s going to be very flat and the performance is going to be mediocre. You know, there are some industries that I have , um, grown up in. I’ve worked in for a long time so I can write almost as well. I spent 11 years in the HPAC industry. So when I spun out Round Peg heating and air conditioning and home services in general, I can write a ton of content without any input from the client and make it sound like them because of my background. Well, I can make it sound like somebody in their industry, but I can’t make it sound like them because even three heating and air conditioning companies are going to have three different voices depending on the owner, the employees. And so I can come closer, but I’m still not there .

Speaker 5: 34:37

[inaudible]

Kyle Hamer: 34:38

So sum it up the power of the question. What, when, when you think about it in, in, you know, 30 or 60 seconds or less, what are the key takeaways? Things that I need to be thinking about? All right, Lorraine , you you’ve, you’ve shared with me , what do I need to be? What do I need to take home with me?

Lorraine Ball: 34:54

Number one, what are the questions you’re already being asked? Number two, where have you answered those questions before? Have you written something? Have you, do you have a standard conversation? Do you have bullet points? So what are you being asked? What do you have before? And then this one is, is going to , I haven’t really talked about it, but answer that question every six weeks, because every six weeks, there’s a new group of customers coming into the marketplace who don’t know you, who haven’t heard from you. So whether you are resharing a different spin on the same topic, whether you are going back into your archives and reinvigorating, or having a new conversation about the same essential topic with a different person on your podcast, there are half a dozen questions that run that really run your business. And then you can do the spin offs and the related topics, but return to those big questions about every six weeks.

Kyle Hamer: 36:09

That’s good stuff. Um, now you mentioned you have hundreds of podcasts and you know, what your message is. If somebody wants to , um , hear more about this particular topic or , or dig deeper on other things, what is your podcast? What is it about and why would they, you know, how can they get more of you , Lorraine?

Lorraine Ball: 36:30

Uh , well, and it’s funny you use the word more, our podcast is more than a few words, and it is a marketing conversation for business owners. We do two episodes a week. The Thursday episode is a 10 minute ish conversation with a marketing professional from around the world. We talk about really narrow topics. The idea is that you walk away with two or three very practical tips. It is audio only. There is no video. It’s not that I don’t want to be face-to-face with my audience, but , uh, my audience is comprised of business owners. They’re busy, they got lots of things to do. And so the 10 minute format you pop in your headset and you can listen on the way to somewhere. You know that you’re going to be able to hear the whole episode as you’re driving, wherever it is, you’re driving, and you can get on with your day. And if you have time, you can binge to the Sunday shows are about a minute to a minute and half, and it’s just a random marketing tip, inspiration, something. I want you to think about something I’ve learned again, just that little snippet. Um, when I say hundreds of the show, we are set, we’re coming up on our 11th year in January. Um, and we have, I think, I want to say we just launched maybe episode five 45, 45, somewhere in there. You can find it@morethanafewwords.com. And the nice thing about going to more than a few words.com is that you can search it’s a WordPress site, so you can search your topic and find half a dozen episodes on just what you’re looking for. And you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, iTunes, Google play, Spotify, just look for more than a few words.com.

Kyle Hamer: 38:31

Fantastic. So as we can, as I can tell here, we’re kind of up on the end. I have two , two or three more questions, and then we’ll, we’ll wrap up with my, like I was looking at your bio on your website and you said one of the reasons that you left corporate America is one , you were tired of bureaucracy, but to really bad coffee. So what is a good cup of coffee for you?

Lorraine Ball: 38:56

Uh, I like all of the nut blends, so I like a good hazelnut coffee. I like a good , um, you know, pecan roast. Um, we have , uh, some friends of ours that used to have a coffee shop and they still buy and distribute their coffee from, from their house in the neighborhood. And they do a creme brulee coffee. Awesome. Awesome. So , uh , I think they actually still have a location in downtown Indianapolis called cups and , uh , it’s in some office building and my husband always picks up the coffee and I love it.

Kyle Hamer: 39:34

That’s fantastic. Um, now the other thing I noticed is , is that you’re heavily involved in , in a couple of things outside of , of marketing , uh , whether it’s it’s arts or the food scene or, or the museum society, and maybe even some shelters I don’t know, with , with your love of cats. Tell us about one thing that doesn’t have to do with marketing that you just adore.

Lorraine Ball: 39:57

I love live theater. And so this has been a really hard year for me because obviously a lot of the theaters, you just can’t do it, but I’m very involved with the Indy fringe theater festival. I love original theater by up and coming playwrights . I love a good Broadway play too. Don’t get me wrong. But there is something about the experience of live theater that you just, I don’t care how many times you watch a TV recording of something that was shot in a live theater. It’s not the same. So I’m looking forward to getting back into the theater

Kyle Hamer: 40:37

That is fantastic. Um , really want to thank you for your generosity and for being here. The , the information that you’ve shared with us today has been just fantastic. Thank you very much, right ?

Lorraine Ball: 40:48

This has been so much fun. Thank you for having me

Kyle Hamer: 40:50

One last question. Is there anything today that we didn’t cover that you wish we could have?

Lorraine Ball: 41:03

I want you to research because we don’t have time. It’s a whole topic on it in and of itself. I want you to go and research the idea of power words, because there are words in our language that are seductive, that are emotional, that grab people in a way that average language doesn’t. And so research power words, and use them to become a better writer, because I really want to elevate the content of the internet in general, and it starts with great writing.

Kyle Hamer: 41:38

That is fantastic. Again, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. For those of you listening, you weave , this has been some, a podcast. I’m your host Kyle Hamer. We’ve had Lorraine ball of Round Peg on as our, as our guest . And she’s also got a podcast more than a few words. You need to go out like subscribe, follow whether it’s myself or it’s the rain get out there, get us in your feed. And until next week, thanks for listening.