IAM1387 – Writer Develops Content Strategies that Creates Lasting Impact

Kate is the founder and CEO of People First Content. She has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Tulsa and has been writing web content for over a decade. She loves working with business owners and company leaders to develop content strategies that will create a lasting impact.

• CEO Story: Kate started freelancing during graduate school writing for the web and academics. When she graduated, she joined a company as an internal writer focused on content. Finding ways can scale it up and if there is a need for content in the market. And found out that a lot are looking for it. So she does it full-time with her company People First Content in April 2019.
• Business Service: Focused on small businesses. Content writing, blogging, lead magnet, e-books, email marketing.
• Secret Sauce: Work with in-house writers and creatives only, directly with clients.
• CEO Hack: Teaching students the fundamentals of writing, tests your knowledge. Makes you better articulate what you are doing.
• CEO Nugget: Consistency and Quality.
• CEO Defined: The critical decision-maker. Take the ideas and execute them.

Website: www.peoplefirstcontent.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kwilliams72

Instagram: www.instagram.com/people1content

Facebook: peoplefirstcontent

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Transcription

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00:21 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Kate Williams of People First Content. Kate, super awesome to have you on the show.

00:58 – Kate Williams

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

00:59 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. Before we do that, of course, I want to read a little bit more about Kate so you hear about some of those awesome things. Kate is the founder and CEO of People First Content. She has a PhD in English language and literature from the University of Tulsa and has been writing web content for over a decade. She loves working with business owners and company leaders to develop content strategies that will create a lasting impact. Kate, excited to have you on the show again. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:28 – Kate Williams

I'm ready.

01:29 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:37 – Kate Williams

Yeah. So, as you listed in the bio, I started in academia. I had my PhD in English language and literature, and that was always the goal for me. Starting in 2003, I think was when I decided to do that. Finally graduated in 2015. But by then, so much had changed in my life and so many things had happened. I started freelancing during grad school just to make some extra money. Kind of fell in love with the medium of writing for the web versus writing academic content.

And so when I graduated, I pursued a career more on the content end, which was pretty new still at that time. In 2015, I joined a company as our first in-house writer. It was just an experiment. Ended up staying there for three years, and built a content team. And then towards the end of there, around 2018, I started thinking, like, I wonder if I could replicate this and build a content team, but start working with other companies because I. I was starting to feel stagnant like I was only focusing on one very specific thing.

I was focusing on one type of content, one type of writing, and I just, I knew there was a lot more out there, so I went back to freelancing nights and weekends, just trying to see if I could pick up clients. And by 2019, I was like, yes, this is. There's a need for this. People want and value content. I'm going to just see how it goes. And so April of 2019, I went full-time with People First Content, and it's been going ever since. I've got a small team now, in-house creatives and writers, and we work with small business owners to develop content strategies and create content for them.

03:12 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that, especially to hear the progression. I think as you were saying, like, you went through a lot of changes between doing your PhD. Also, the world has gone through a lot of changes as well, too. And as you mentioned, content writing and content marketing are so funny to kind of hear because a lot of times they say the jobs that will exist 510 years from now don't even exist. Like, what you're going to be applying for doesn't even exist. So sounds like while you were kind of getting your PhD, you had that kind of similar experience.

03:39 – Kate Williams

Yeah, exactly. It's like, what? Cause I'll have people. I'll even have people ask, like, do you feel like you wasted time? And I'm like, no, I don't. I think everything's an experience. But also, like, how would I have known in 2003 that I wanted to be a, like, that wasn't a thing? Facebook was just new, and, you know, all these things are happening, and it's exciting to be part of something and watch content grow from nothing to what it is today and think about the future of it.

04:04 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. It's an exciting time. And as an English major, and I don't have a PhD, but an English major, I definitely say there is no wasted English major degree because it's a foundational skill that you can use in literally everything that you do. So I echo everything that you're talking about, and I've done.

04:19 – Kate Williams

Awesome.

04:21- Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. So I know you touched on a little bit on how you work with and serve your clients. Could you drill down a little bit more, and take us through exactly how that works and how you're impacting and serving the clients you're working with?

04:30 – Kate Williams

Yeah, so we work with a focus on small businesses. I can be anything from solopreneurs to, you know, 50 or less people. Generally our client base, they're people who have a need for content. It might be blog writing, it might be lead magnets, ebooks, you know, all email marketing. So they have a content need, but not necessarily either the budget or, you know, the workload to hire somebody in-house. They may not need a full-time staffer. And so we work as an extension of their team. By partnering with them, we really get to know the clients. We focus on building relationships and building partnerships with them, and so we become part of their team.

We sit on meetings and sometimes calls with them. We work on I think one of the benefits of having the PhD in doing this is I'm really good at researching and taking all of the different research and putting it into something that makes sense. And that's my favorite part of combining academia with content writing is making it make sense not to an academic audience, but to normal people, like someone flipping through, you know, reading LinkedIn on their break or whatever.

And so we work with a lot of industries other people don't like to work with us, like manufacturing, healthcare, finance, like the ones that really require some deep thoughts. We focus mostly on b, two b, but we do some b, two c, and love working with women business owners and are pretty open to working with any kind of businesses that have that need for content.

06:00 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that, especially hearing. You said you felt like you were kind of stagnating and how this provided an opportunity to have a lot of, I imagine, different clients, different types of content and pieces that you get to create.

07:11 – Kate Williams

Yeah, definitely. And talking to business owners about their own journeys has been so illuminating for me. And education. I've learned so, so much about not just obviously different industries. I feel like an expert in a lot of random industries. I never would have imagined just having to research and do these things, but also building businesses of different journeys people take. So it's been really, really, really cool.

07:34 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, it's awesome. Like a vast amount of knowledge and, you know, an experience that you have and be able to kind of, you know, work with and do. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

07:49 – Kate Williams

One thing that I think sets our team apart is our work. I only work with in-house writers and creatives. I know a lot of agencies. A standard model is more of freelancing everything, going to a content mill, or finding other freelancers. We work directly with the clients so they know exactly who they're working with. We're all based here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And so that helps. I think that provides better value for me, for the clients, and for the team. So for me, I like training people and having, having the teaching backgrounds really like the one-on-one mentoring, being able to help moderators and designers, like, figure out how can we get better? How can we improve?

You don't get that relationship with a freelancer necessarily for clients. They get better content because of it because this is our job. It's not just a freelancer trying to do one gig and get onto the next. And then that goes into the writers, too. As a writer, I know how devalued we can be sometimes. So I really wanted to build a company that values writers, that gives them the financial stability so they can just focus on doing the work without having to be like, okay, I just need to get this done so I can get my next paycheck. It's, nope, this is it. You're getting paid no matter what. Like, we're going to work through it. Clients have problems. We'll figure it out. And I think that I feel like that provides much better quality content.

09:15 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I love that. And I love the name of everything that you're doing, the people-first content. One of the things that you said earlier that really kind of resonated with me is that a lot of times people will create content just for creating content just to try to check it off a list, but actually understanding, like, who you're trying to create the content for and having, like, that team that you have in place to really make that happen is so huge.

09:37 – Kate Williams

Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. And that's where the name people first content kind of comes from. As I was trying to come up with it, I just kept coming back to it, and I was like, well, I guess that's our name now, because that's what I value, is people first, people, relationships, writing for people in that algorithm. All of it.

09:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. We forget about all those things, all this technology and things that we have in place, but really, that's just a tool to sometimes create and develop those relationships, those connections, and really go deep with our clients, our team members, our, you know, podcast guests, whatever it might be, that just provides an opportunity for that to happen.

10:10 – Kate Williams

Exactly.

10:11 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:22 – Kate Williams

I. That's a really good question. So I was thinking, my CEO hack, in grad school, we used to tell our students, because our professors told us, you don't really know something until you've had to teach it to somebody. And so when I was teaching composition, I feel like all those years that I was doing that as a teaching assistant really helped me better understand writing. And so you can articulate instead of just saying, I don't like this. Well, why? That's not helpful to a student.

And so going through and articulating, like, you know, teaching all the fundamentals, fundamentals of writing, working with students specifically on, like, okay, how can you make this better? How can we make this argument stronger? You're not actually addressing your audience. So all of that has helped me. And now, as I'm continuing to do it with my team, also, I think teaching, when you can tell somebody how to do something like that, really tests your knowledge and it stretches you because you can look back at your own work.

I can look at my own work and say, oh, here's something I'm telling my writers to do, but I'm not doing it. So now I can go back and. And make it better. And so, yeah, I think I would challenge people to find a way to teach, whether it's through speaking or podcasting or something that helps you better articulate what you're doing and understand it.

11:38 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say. It might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:51 – Kate Williams

So what I would tell clients about content specifically is the main two. There's so much out there, if you go and read about it like you're going to, your head's going to spin. The two things that matter are consistency and quality. And I would also go back and tell my younger self that because I was preaching to my clients and I was not doing it. I was not writing blog content, I wasn't doing social media, telling everyone else they should be doing these things. When I brought a team on, I have them doing it for me now, which is great.

And we've seen so much success in just a short amount of time. And so it's like, okay, yeah, this really is consistency and quality. So I've seen too many business owners who go all in. They're like, we're going to do twelve blog posts a month and we're going to do this. And then they just burn out because times change or they get busy. If you need to start with one blog post a month, that's better than nothing, and then build it up from there and then make sure it's high quality. Because no point in being number one on Google, if the article doesn't make sense, if it doesn't get people to click buy now, or whatever your call to action is, you need to build your reputation through your content.

13:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love that you mentioned that. And I think so many times as I talked about, sometimes people will create content just to check off a box and say, oh, we did it. We created this blog post. But you talked about, what I hear is definitely that deeper meaning of why you're creating the content. And then usually that translating goes in tandem with the quality. Because if you know why you're doing it, then all of a sudden you can say, this is what our goal is. So you start to kind of write and I imagine create, craft a strategy around that goal. And then, you know, of course, to be able to do that consistently is what, you know, separates you from the pack.

13:31 – Kate Williams

Yep, absolutely.

13:34 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote CEO's on this show. So, Kate, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:44 – Kate Williams

For me, being a CEO is being a critical decision-maker. I was trying to figure out a cute way to say CEO. I think that's what I was lacking. And I think so many people lack in their corporate world. It's like, I have a feeling I know how to do this better and I'm stuck. I can't do it any better. And so now as the CEO, it's like I can take these ideas and I can execute them, and then based on data, based on experience, based on whatever, I can execute them and get them going. And I love working directly with other CEOs to do the same thing. We don't have red tape, we don't have bureaucracy. Just, hey, CEO to CEO, what do you want to do? When do you want it done? Let's go do it. So that's what the CEO is for me.

14:35 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And I'm going to start a petition that we should change CEO to CDM because I love that definition so much that we should start calling CDMs important because at the end of the day, like, nothing moves unless those decisions are made. So you can do a lot of, you know, graphs, you could do brainstorming, just all these things. But it's those decisions that actually move things forward. So I love that, you know, you've been able to do that with your team, but also recognize how important that is with the organizations and the clients that you work with as well.

15:03 – Kate Williams

Yeah, no, I love working directly, with executives for that reason.

15:08 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Kate, truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak. Just see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

15:24 – Kate Williams

Well, I appreciate all the work that you have done and thank you for having me as a guest on this. I think listening to others, like I said, just having conversations with CEOs, I've learned so much. So having a podcast where we can just listen to other CEO's and gain experience is invaluable. And so I hope to have contributed something to the ongoing conversation. We'll see if CBM becomes a thing, you know, if companies need content, I'm always open to talking to companies about their content needs, whether that's, like I said, a blog post or two a month, or something larger, a larger strategy.

Our goal is to work as an extension of your team as the content team so you can scale up or down if you're like, hey, we only need this much, this, you know, this month we can work with you to help reduce costs and overhead while still getting that quality content so people can reach out at peoplefirstcontent.com is our website. Or email me directly at kateoplefirstcontent.com if they want to learn more.

16:22 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I appreciate that so much, Kate. We will make it even easier. Have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you and your team and all the awesome things that you're doing. And as an English major, I always usually say that we have the right to be able to create words. We have the right to be able to make changes. So we're going to get CDM as a word that's recognized because we English majors that do it.

And I love the work that you do and meeting people where they are because I think, again, sometimes people don't have the kind of ability to be able to communicate some of the awesome things that they're doing. So I love that you bridge that gap and make that happen. So appreciate you for doing that today and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

17:00 – Kate Williams

Awesome. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.

17:02 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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