Episode 005

Shaina Weisinger: Hey guys, how’s it going? It’s Shaina here with Repurpose House for another episode of Content Karate. I have the lead zombie over at Ad Zombies here with me. He is awesome. He is a friend of mine. I’m so pumped that he’s coming on to chat about his crazy awesome content game. Ken, say hello, tell people a little bit about who you are and let’s get in it.

Spanky Moskowitz: Shaina, first of all, you know, in this crazy time we’re living in, you see zombies back there. Rob has got his face mask on. We should be practicing safe content. All right, that’s right. There we go. Although you look like you’re going to rob a banquet with that thing. I at least look like I’m going to perform surgery on somebody. So, so tell you a little bit about myself — born and raised in New York city. Was a nerd as a kid. Started doing ads in my bedroom while other kids were playing out on the beach and out front and playing stick ball. Not me. I was nerding out creating radio ads as a kid. And I knew from a very early age, that was my path. You know, Luke Skywalker knew he was going to be a Jedi. I knew I was going to be a radio guy. And so I started writing ads and that’s where my career went and spent gazillion years in radio and broadcasting, got to work with some amazing brands, became a head of creative for a big company, then moved on and built my own businesses. And here we are having a conversation today about writing.

Shaina Weisinger: Here we are right now–

Spanky Moskowitz: How was that for short and sweet, which is not typical?

Shaina Weisinger: And what’s amazing is, guys, his rap sheet is nuts. So it’s like, To cram it all in that much time, if you guys get a chance to chat or hit up Ken, go to his LinkedIn and talk to him, he’s got stories for days.

Spanky Moskowitz: I do good, bad and different for sure.

Shaina Weisinger: Well, don’t we all right? So let’s talk about ads on these specifically. So first of all, what, what is Ad Zombies? And then we’re going to dive into your content.

Spanky Moskowitz: Okay.

Shaina Weisinger: Why it helps you guys

Spanky Moskowitz: Ad Zombies is an at-scale copywriting service. We write words that sell anything for businesses anywhere. And when I say that, the answer is, yes, can we write ads? Absolutely. Can we write email sequences? Yes. Do we write landing pages, web copy? Anything that needs words for business, which is everything we can write. We don’t do package design. We don’t run the ads. We’re not a marketing firm and that’s it. That’s what we do.

Shaina Weisinger: I love it. It’s so simple. And it works, which is awesome. Cool. Okay. So you are a content king. Um, I find it highly.

Spanky Moskowitz: Some people call me a content whore, but that’s okay. I’ll take that. That’s fine.

Shaina Weisinger: You have been trained by some of the greats, the ultimate content king Gary V. You’ve had multiple chats with him about your strategy, I think it’s pretty rad. So you have a couple of different strategies. You’ve got ads on Biz Content and then you as a personal brand like crush. So let’s talk about how you– because a lot of people are like, “Do I just do conduct for my brand? Is doing the personal brand too much?” Like, there’s all I get a lot of people even I had the question about how much to do of each. And I want to kind of find out how you got to like where you’re at now. And I feel like you’re in a flow at this point. Did you struggle with that? Like, how did you get to this?

Spanky Moskowitz: I did struggle with it because you know, one of the things that Gary V preaches is, “document don’t create.” And oftentimes I find myself or early on found myself questioning. “Yeah, but do people really want to see this crap? Like, am I documenting stuff that no one cares about?” And, but, but what I started to realize, Shaina, this is so important because every business owner, every marketer, anybody, who puts energy into the promotion of their business needs to know this: you are somewhere in your business journey that someone else wishes to be. And so sharing your steps of the journey, sharing your successes, your failures, the happy, the sad, this is how we communicate as human beings and have done. So for centuries, like back in the days of cavemen writing on the walls to say there was a scary fricking monster outside the cave, right, a saber tooth tiger, but it’s the same thing. So storytelling is what I do best. And whether it’s written word or me sharing the content of my life, the business, the journey, the ugly stuff. Like when I got hated on so much that it almost destroyed my business because of an ad with ice cream scoops. Right. So all of those little moments have such value to someone else because they can learn very quickly by your documenting “Don’t do that or do that.” Right. And so that’s the value there. So at first I questioned always like, “Is this valuable?” But over time, as I saw the momentum and I saw the energy that those posts were getting, I’m like, no, this is the right stuff. And I don’t do it for the likes and the comments and the shares…

Spanky Moskowitz: …it’s the comments of, “Oh my God, this helped me so much.” Or “I am exactly where you were when I saw this,” and “Thank you for sharing this.” Like, those things matter to me, because I remember just drowning as this company was getting underway and having just these panic attacks. Like I couldn’t sleep, I’d wake up, I was so panicked and things were out of control. And I felt like I had made the biggest mistake and sharing those things, sharing those moments is cathartic. And it also helps somebody else who might be going through that same exact thing in that moment.

Shaina Weisinger: Sure. And I think that there’s, you know, what’s tough about those is that it’s scary to feel like you want to share and be vulnerable and honest about things like that, because I’ve struggled with posting a couple of things about stuff that was going on with my business personally, but like, ultimately it makes you a human, you know,

Spanky Moskowitz: It does, it does. And, and you have to realize though that the state of the world we’re living in today, people use social as a tool to not only grow their business, but to vent and to have opinions. And sometimes you’re going to put something out there that somebody may not like, and you have to decide to pick your battles, right? You’re going to get into a heated debate about this? Or are you going to stop? And, and sometimes that bites you in the butt. It bit me in the butt a couple of times. But you learn over time. Okay. I can’t share this stuff. And so you, become a little guarded on the personal stuff you share. Sure. Right. But you become an extrovert when it comes to the business.

Shaina Weisinger: For sure. I love that. Okay. So I know if, if I didn’t already know you and understand how everything works, I’d be asking myself. Okay. But how does this help your business? Like all the content for what reason? Right.

Spanky Moskowitz: Right. Um, I can tell you this in a word: content drives transactions, and it doesn’t drive transactions in the typical sense of, put an ad up with a conversion goal and sales come in. Weirdness to a point where you become the go-to, you know, Shaina. And I know you’ve, you I’ve talked to you about this before, but I want to share this because I think the audience will get so much value out of this. And so everybody watching this, just play along with me and just shout at your screen, even though I can’t hear you. Okay? If you had a cut on your finger, what would you put on your finger to protect it?

Shaina Weisinger: Band-aid.

Spanky Moskowitz: Okay. If you had a bad case of hemorrhoids, what would you buy at the pharmacy for the hemorrhoids named the product?

Spanky Moskowitz: Um, if you had a cold and had to blow your nose, what would you use?

Shaina Weisinger: My shirt.

Spanky Moskowitz: Right? Um, so, but here’s the thing, a Band-aid is a brand. Preparation H is a brand. Kleenex is a brand. It’s a bandage, it’s a hemorrhoid ointment or cream. And it’s a tissue. Yeah. And so they have become the go-to in their industries. And so the content you put out there, no matter what your business is, allows you to become the authority of your industry. Even if that industry is pizza-making, funeral homes, it doesn’t matter. And people want to have the experience of knowing what it’s like in your business, because there are other people who are in different businesses, but are at similar places in life, in their business cycle. And that stuff really helps them. And that’s how your business grows. I will tell you so much of the content that I put out there that we put out there as a business, as a brand drive sales, we can see direct conversions, right? Because if you’re tracking in social media and you’re using pixels, like a smart marketers, you guys should all be doing that. And those of you who don’t know you better hit me up, cause I got to have a conversation with you. You should be able to track that and we can track positive revenue to content that has no ask attached to it. And that comes from building authority and trust.

Shaina Weisinger: Oh, I love that. That example, like you went out on a limb to see if I was even going to say those things, just knowing that that was going to happen. A shirt threw you off, but we all knew I was going to land on Kleenex. So there you go. Um, okay, cool. So you’re, let’s circling back to document, not create. Yeah. Um, what does your process look like? Like tactical step A, step B, step C.

Spanky Moskowitz: Okay. I will tell you that 90% of the time there are cameras running at every conversation in every meeting that we have, that’s not private. You’ve got to do that. In fact, we were just talking about some new cameras to mount where we’re, um, we’ve fit. Our lease is almost done in our version one office space. And now we’re looking for a new space and which will take occupancy of next year. And so we’re like, okay, what camera systems do we want to put in? That are hard, that are ready for us at all times in strategic places. So everything can get captured because it’s really hard when you have to go back and recreate a moment and recreating sucks because that is creating, right? Think about the time you spend to create something, it’s scripting it. And then it’s like, oh, that feels weird.

Spanky Moskowitz: And doesn’t sound right, because it’s not real. It’s not genuine. It’s forced. And so if you’re recording everything, right, just like we’re having this conversation and it’s being recorded. It’s, it’s real. It’s there. If you screw up, okay, you screw up. It’s part of who we are as humans. And then from that moment, all of that recorded footage gets handed off to, I have an internal editor who chops it all down, right. And gets it shortened up. And then it goes into the Repurpose House machine, and then you guys then put all of the microcontent. You bring that to life. And then that micro content comes back into my ecosystem. It gets scheduled out and we are putting out my goal. I have a goal of 10 pieces of content per platform per day. Wow. And if you look at my Agorapulse, that’s a tool that I use for scheduling.

Spanky Moskowitz: That thing is pretty full. And like, people look at that and they’re like, whoa, that’s overwhelming, but it’s not overwhelming because when you’re putting out content at scale, yeah. You have to realize that people don’t see everything you put out there. Someone asked me a few days ago, uh, in, in a comment, “I see you recycling or repurposing some of your content every now and again, why do you do that?” And now it happened to be that this person had one of those super fan badges. And so they see everything. But you have to recognize that the majority of the people that, that are surfing Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, the platform are not seeing everything. They’re seeing like a fraction of the stuff that you put out there. So the way to get the algorithm to serve more content is to feed more content into the system content that gets amplified because the platform sees people going, “Oh, I like this.”

Spanky Moskowitz: Oh, I’ll share this. Right, we had a new piece of content that actually it wasn’t content. It was an ad that went out yesterday. And I should have had this morning when I walked in, I wish I had thought to just turn cameras on. I just didn’t. I made a mistake in Facebook and I accidentally spent like a thousand dollars in 12 hours because I had set something wrong. And, but that ad quickly got to a hundred thousand views, has hundreds and hundreds of reactions. It has, you know, dozens of shares, right? That all those signals, even though those were paid, those signals in the organic space is what tells the platform to serve more of this content to your audience. Right. And so when you put that out at scale, what happens is miraculous. You can put out a piece of content and I do this regularly. I did something the other day. I put it out there and within hours it had thousands of people on that content. And I’m not paying for that. It’s the organic reach gets amplified. The more you put out there. So don’t hesitate. Don’t be afraid to put it out there at scale.

Shaina Weisinger: Yeah, absolutely. And for — yes, I’ll ramble for a few seconds while you take a breather, okay. That was quick. Thank you for that. Oh my gosh. I love that. You know, it’s funny because I’ve heard, it’s one of the things that I say on repeat is that people like with old podcast episodes, like them repurposing, even the full length episode that never really hits social. They’re like everybody already saw that piece of content or everybody already listened to that. I’m like everybody, right. Maybe all of your super fans. And how many of those do you have, but like the majority of your audience may have not even known that that was a thing that you did in the past.

Spanky Moskowitz: Right? Across all platforms. I have collectively about a million plus or minus followers, right. Across all social that’s brand, my brand, right? Facebook, Insta, TikToK, , LinkedIn, think of all the platforms, all the stuff. And, but of those platforms, I may have 10 super fans on one, five on the other, none on one, TikTok, I suck at. But I have my– listen. It is what it is. I have my good friend, Rachel Peterson who holds my hand and tells me it’ll be okay. And it’s not because I don’t know the platform or don’t want, and I, you know, many of us, myself included sometimes, especially entrepreneurs, we like to spread ourselves a little thin. And you know, Gary talks about this and I’ve had a very thoughtful conversation with him about this. There’s a difference between going wide and going deep.

Spanky Moskowitz: And so if you look at all of my social profiles, you would see that I go deep on Facebook. I go deep on Instagram, but I’m going wide on LinkedIn. And I’m going wide on Twitter. And I’m going wide on TikTok. And what happens is, is that I’m a little diluted in those spaces because they’re not my core passions, but you need to be there. So if you’re starting out on social and, listen, I get it because I’m the one who posts my content. There is no one on my team that posts my content. Me, I do it. And so when you see that stuff out there, you’ve got to know my finger is the one that clicked it to send it into the ecosystem. I get that it’s hard, but you don’t have to publish on every platform to start. I would recommend don’t make mistakes, go deep first, get your foundation, get your footing, and then start to go wide.

Shaina Weisinger: Absolutely. And then at least you’ve had a chance to know the content that’s working whenever you are going deep, because you’ve done enough on those platforms to really see how people are responding. And that’s what you go test on the other ones, is that’s how I would do it at least, um, a hundred percent. So let’s talk about the elephant in the room, how you said, TikTok, you’re on. And you’re not, not super awesome at it, but I get asked about it constantly. I’m like–

Spanky Moskowitz: Okay, I love being on TikTok because it embarrasses the crap out of my teenage daughters and motives that I do. And I don’t, and, and my daughter, you know, Sydney, my oldest daughter, she’s 15 this week. She is so like, she is beside herself that someone with a blue check mark follows me and she’s like, “That girl has a blue check mark.” And I’m like, “I know, I know lots of blue check mark people.” Um, but like it’s, to them, that’s a status symbol to me. It’s just like, it’s the people I know. But the reality is I suck at it, but here’s the thing. You don’t need to be an expert in TikTok and you don’t need to do silly dances. I am not a cheerleader. I am not a dancer. That is not the way I use the platform is I share the micro content that fits within their timeframe.

Spanky Moskowitz: Right. And I do it in that 9:16, which is, you know, the tall format that fits a phone. And it’s really quite easy for me because what I do is I look at the content that hits on the other platforms. And those are the pieces I drop in, where I’ve got, where I suck is I’ve not gotten consistent yet. And that’s part of it is because I’ve become so comfortable using Agorapulse as a tool and Agorapulse still does not do TikTok and the APIs don’t communicate. So it physically requires extra effort where I have to download the thing to my phone. Then I’ve got to upload the thing onTikTok, like doing it this way is old school. Super cool. But I’d rather sit there in front of the dashboard, like the king of the world, and roll with my content.

Shaina Weisinger: Oh yeah. I feel that. And that’s why I get out. We get asked a lot of we’ll manage TikTok at all. I’m like, no, because there’s no way to schedule any of that.

Spanky Moskowitz: I’m going to pull up my Agorapulse now because I may do a quick share with you. Yeah.

Shaina Weisinger: I will just keep going.

Shaina Weisinger: So the platform that we use is saying that they’re going to release, um, TikTok as a platform. They can manage by the end of the year, but it’ll likely be the push notification, like Instagram stories is generally. So I’m like, well, that doesn’t really help me, but it’s better than having to sit there and type the whole thing.

Spanky Moskowitz: Yeah. So I’m going to, I’m going to do a screen share.

Shaina Weisinger: Yeah, go ahead. Do it please. Okay.

Spanky Moskowitz: I’m going to share this screen. This is going to be, oh boy, an inside look. This is my September content calendar.

Spanky Moskowitz: Um, so I mean, you can see it’s heavy

Shaina Weisinger: 19-22, 19-26.

Spanky Moskowitz: Let’s jump to October. October is getting scheduled out now. There’s October. Let’s see how November is looking now. It’s getting thinner because I’m further out December. I mean, there’s, there’s some heavy content, January. Like I’ve got stuff now. And here’s the thing, Shaina, I repurpose stuff on purpose. And again, just remember if you think that everyone has seen your stuff the first time, they didn’t. If you see, think that, oh, I’ve posted this three times, you haven’t even scratched the surface of whose eyeballs are on it, except for your super fans. This guy sees everything and he’s a super fan. But the reality is not a soul is really seeing your stuff. It takes so much, so many hits of that content being out there, remember you’re served literally 5,000 ads a day or ad messages a day. How on earth are you going to see a piece of content that I share from a meeting with a client on strategy?

Shaina Weisinger: Yeah. Right, right. It’s absolutely true. So if anybody’s taking anything away, it’s, don’t be afraid to recycle your content on the platforms over and over, over again. And also scheduling out that far in advance. Like some people just get a week ahead of it and that you’re doing yourself a disservice to not consistently be.. you saw his, he was into October and it was still super stacked. So imagine what November, December, and all those look like. So, um, that’s usually helpful.

Spanky Moskowitz: And another thing I will say this, and this is, and I’m going to, okay, this is going to be my ten second negative. I’m going to, I’m going to crap on a platform for a moment. Here we go. I I’m so angry at LinkedIn right now.

Shaina Weisinger: Oh! Okay. Why, what happened?

Spanky Moskowitz: If you’re using a third party app, the API doesn’t allow your LinkedIn profile to upload videos. It is the dumbest thing you and I have gone over and over. And LinkedIn’s like, “Well, just create a brand page for yourself.” I have 20, 30, 40,000– I don’t know how many followers I have on LinkedIn, but now you have to migrate those people to this new thing. And that doesn’t happen. So, if LinkedIn, LinkedIn gods, if you’re watching this, and I know you are because I’m going to tweet this and I’m going to tag you, and I’m going to LinkedIn, you fix that API so that we can use video through a third party app. Yeah. And because man, that is why my LinkedIn game is suffering right now. Yeah.

Shaina Weisinger: It’s a bummer. And we’ve talked about trying to hack this thing with like YouTube videos and the ratios and all of that. And there’s really no way to do it, that you have to upload it natively. And it’s a huge, huge bummer.

Spanky Moskowitz: I’m becoming a hater. It’s okay.

Shaina Weisinger: If enough people, everybody contact LinkedIn!

Spanky Moskowitz: I’m going to his mask off and sick him on them. Cause once the zombie is loose, man, it’s run for the Hills.

Shaina Weisinger: There you go.

Shaina Weisinger: Good. Awesome. Um, all right. So what, what have we not talked about that you think is super important for people to know about content strategy?

Spanky Moskowitz: One of the things that I think is so vital is not getting in your head, uh, about, oh, should I post this? Or when’s the good time to post this? Or should I schedule this? Or, oh, maybe I should schedule it at night or listen, Linda, if you don’t know, if it is just Google search Linda listen and you’ll know. Okay. So if you have no idea what that reference is, oh, I should be wearing my ReHo hat what? My Reho hat, hold on. I just realized, I’m doing you a terrible disservice–

Shaina Weisinger: You got a hat! oh, there we go. I love it.

Spanky Moskowitz: Yeah. Um, although it shades my eyes, although it does take the shine off my head.

Shaina Weisinger: Yeah. This is, this is bad hair, Shaina.

Spanky Moskowitz: I always have a bad hair day, Shaina.

Spanky Moskowitz: Come on. So don’t get in your head about when to schedule your content and here’s why, and so I want you to take yourself out of the marketer role for a second and put yourself in the passenger seat of being a content consumer. I don’t know about you, but on those nights where I wake up at two in the morning for no reason, and I can’t fall back asleep, I pick up my phone and I just kinda thumb through. And I’m like, “Oh, look at this piece of content. I’m going to save that for later. I like that. I want to remember that tomorrow.” Um, or, you know, you’re busy in the middle of the day. You take a break, you mentally check out and you start surfing, pick the platform, you’re doing the exact thing that the people that you want to see your content are doing, just because the algorithm says the best time of day for your stuff is to post at that time does not mean you should post everything at that time, just post it. Just randomize.

Spanky Moskowitz: It doesn’t matter because human beings use platforms the way they use platforms. And today is different than yesterday. The month of August was a blur for me. I was on the couch most of the month in the fetal position because I had three oral surgeries and an infection. And actually it was two infections. Um, like the month of August was a blur. My social media consumption changed dramatically.

Shaina Weisinger: For sure.

Spanky Moskowitz: And you have to realize that people have things going on in their lives. Whether they’re business owners, I am, or people who work in not every day is the same. And so their consumption of content changes and the work-from-home model of the world right now has really changed consumption and the times that people do things. So forget about the algorithms, just push the stuff out there, create a schedule. If a schedule doesn’t work, randomize it, whatever it is, but get the content out there. Because the content does you no good when it’s sitting in your computer, when it’s sitting on your phone, it does no good because no one’s gonna see it, except the person you go, “Hey, did you see this cool thing I made?” Great. What are you going to do with that? Get it out there. People need to see what’s going on in your business.

Shaina Weisinger: Oh, I love that. That it’s such an easy thing to implement. And most people I’m sure are in their own head. So that’s awesome. Cool.

Spanky Moskowitz: Well, it gets stuck.

Shaina Weisinger: They get stuck. Yeah. Get unstuck guys. All right, Ken, this has been crazy amazing as per usual. I love chatting with you. We got to do this more often for sure. Um, how do people get to check out all of this crazy amount of content? Literally go anywhere and Ken’s there, apparently. So what’s the best way. What’s the best way to find you?

Spanky Moskowitz: Way. So if, if you want to follow the Ad Zombies brand, pick the social channel @adzombies, A D Z O M B I E S. Or if you want to follow me @Spanky, S P A N K Y Moskowitz . It’s M O S K O W I T Z. And that’s across every social channel, by the way. That’s another thing for you. If you don’t have brand consistency across your social channels, fix it and you need to fix it because you want it to be easy for people to find you. You don’t want to be something underscore something on this platform and then something different on that platform. Consistency makes it easy because then people have to remember one thing @SpankyMoskowitz, @yournamehere.

Shaina Weisinger: I love it. And I did you a massive disservice. I legit introduced you as Ken.

Spanky Moskowitz: That’s okay.

Shaina Weisinger: That’s my own fault on the brand consistency for you. Man…

Spanky Moskowitz: whatever I’m okay.

Shaina Weisinger: Well, thank you. Thank you for being with us. You guys, thanks for watching and listening. If you got anything out of this, which I’m sure you got tons of awesome. I mean, I got so much out of it. Share with other people who you think would also get awesome value out of it. Like it. Come check out our episodes next week. And thank you. Thank you so much for being here.

Spanky Moskowitz: Thanks for having me. Awesome.

Shaina Weisinger: All right. Thank you. This was amazing. It was so good chatting with you as always gold, which is why I love that you have cameras running in your office all day. So…

Spanky Moskowitz: Um, you know, the things that I didn’t get to are like— in these are so like— we could do another one of these—

Shaina Weisinger: We should do another one.

Spanky Moskowitz: We can record it and then, you know, you can just save it for five months down the road. Um, you know, stuff that I’ve picked up from Russell Brunson. And so my value mission statement for the business, um, my version of the JK 5, my SM 5, those things, right? That every company, everybody that you’re putting on content, you should have pillars. What are those pillars? So like, I’ve gone. That’s why I said, I’ve gotten stuff here. Like I have a friend, these are my, this is my SM 5. These are the five pillar content pieces that I talk about. If it’s not, if it doesn’t fit into this, it doesn’t go out. So those things, I think that’s another thing that people have to like, just get wrap your head around. What are the pillars of content that you’re going to put out there? So that’s another whole ‘nother episode.

Shaina Weisinger: We should, I mean, I’m down to do another one for sure. So yeah, let’s get that on the books. Definitely.

Spanky Moskowitz: Fo shizzle my nizzle.

Shaina Weisinger: Awesome. Well, it was so great chatting with you. Thanks so much for making the time. I’m glad you’re all healed up

Spanky Moskowitz: And, uh, me too. I’ll bet. I’ll bet.

Shaina Weisinger: All right, dude. Well, I’ll chat with you soon. Thank you.

Spanky Moskowitz: You got to take care.

Shaina Weisinger: Bye!