How to Improve Your Writing and Build Influence Online with Morissa Schwartz

In episode 90, host Eric Dickmann interviews Morissa Schwartz. Morissa is an entrepreneur, social media specialist, marketing expert, best-selling author, and Founder of Dr. Rissy’s Writing & Marketing. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and a Master's in Communications.  Morissa has published several books and articles in periodicals including Entertainment Weekly, Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance, Buzzfeed, and more. Alongside that, Dr. Schwartz has spoken about digital entrepreneurship and building a work-from-home team at numerous events. 

For show notes and a  list of resources mentioned in this episode, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/how-to-improve-writing-build-influence-onlines6ep9/

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Transcript

Eric Dickmann: 0:31

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Morissa, welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast. I'm very glad that you could join us today.

Morissa Schwartz: 0:53

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Eric Dickmann: 0:55

Yeah, it's exciting. We're going to get a chance to talk about a topic which I do love, which is writing and the power of the written word. And you know, it's so interesting to me because we're in an era right now of so much video content, right? Everything is video, video TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Everybody wants to be creating video content. But there's still such power in the written word. Where do you think things stand with creating online written content?

Morissa Schwartz: 1:26

I think online written content is here to stay. It's still very much has a place. At one side video content, they both do very different things. So I just became a writer for Entrepreneur. And you know, being in that, I see how many people are reading these articles. There are a lot of people reading those articles. On the other hand, I'm creating video, I get about 4 million views a month on TikTok. So there's a place for both, and I think that's a beautiful thing. I know personally, you know, during the day, my mind is more active. I like to read, but if it's at night where I'm shutting down, I'm getting tired, that's why I'm watching the videos so I could turn my brain off a little bit more. So definitely places for both.

Eric Dickmann: 2:05

So as you create content, both for yourself and for clients, what do you think is working now with written content? Is the content getting shorter? Are people reducing the length of their blog posts or other written content? Do you think that long form content is doing better? Where do you see things today?

Morissa Schwartz: 2:26

You can have long form content, as long as you have it organized in an aesthetically pleasing way. So if you want to do a thousand word blog posts, great. Google algorithms love it, humans love it. As long as you have headings, you have some images to illustrate what you're talking about. Definitely making sure that it is as easy to read as possible. And by that, I mean easy on the eyes, not necessarily, you know, writing out like a third grade reading level. You can put that in an advanced reading level, just as long as it's aesthetically pleasing, because when we're looking at our devices all day, it's easy to get a headache. It's easy to just kind of have your eyes glaze over. You need something to keep that visual stimuli. So I don't necessarily think short content is better. Even Twitter expanded their character limit a few years ago because of that, because we are moving away from shorter content because shorter content gets dangerous. People just read headlines and sound bites. The other day I accidentally clicked retweet on an article that I hadn't read. And Twitter said to me, are you sure you want to retweet that without reading the whole article? Oh my gosh. Wow, I didn't even know they had that. Thank gosh they have that. So I think it's really good that people are becoming more active and sure to read the whole thing and get all the details. So I think long form is here to stay as well.

Eric Dickmann: 3:49

I It used to be that our options were kind of limited when we wanted to have written content, right? You could either have a company blog or a personal blog, or maybe used a tool like a Blogger back in the day. But now you've got other mediums as well, like Medium, or like doing a post directly on LinkedIn for example. When you're working with clients, what do you find most effective or where do you think embracing some of those other channels becomes a good strategy for you in trying to get your content out there?

Morissa Schwartz: 4:20

Well first off having your own blog on your website. So you have whatever your company is, and then you have your homepage, your info, and About page, your Contact page, and then a blog. That's great for your SEO. It's also great to show you as an authority figure, and it's not enough just to add the blog, but you should also be doing backlinks to high domain authority websites. We have some clients that are on websites like New York Weekly, Times, or me being an entrepreneur. Contributor, it helps my domain authority because now on this popular website, so things like that are really helpful. I've kind of taken the place of a blogger, like I had a blog from the time I think I was like eight years old where I would just post. little fun facts and stuff. And I love that, but that's not gonna help you get to the right audiences, having website with that, and also having your social media, having all your strategies connected. I'm a big believer in PR and social media strategy working together. If you post on your blog, post it on your social media as well. And then the PR comes in where you're pitching out to big name websites to get them to publish an article with your backlink in it. So.

Eric Dickmann: 5:32

And that's such a challenge. I'd love it if you could just share with the audience some tips around that, because I believe in that too, backlinks are so important, especially if you can get them from very credible sources, like an Entrepreneur magazine or Forbes, or whatnot. What is a good strategy for somebody if they've written a really nice piece of content to try to get that picked up by somebody else, or to try to write something specifically for one of these publications?

Morissa Schwartz: 5:56

Yeah. So first of all, a website like Forbes, Entrepreneur, they have changed so much in the past year. They really don't accept pitchers anymore.

Eric Dickmann: 6:05

Oh, really? Okay.

Morissa Schwartz: 6:06

Yeah. A lot of them, they changed the rules. But smaller ones or other ones, I think Business Insider, they still accept pitches. You want to number one, not just send a generic pitch to everybody. We can tell. Since becoming an Entrepreneur writer two weeks ago, I've gotten at least 20 pitches from people. Some of them just say backlink please. How much for backlink? And I'm like, that is not how it works. And you can't like you send this to every contributor you can find. But the ones who appeal to me, where I actually reach out and say, Hey, you know we can't back link on Entrepreneur, but here's some other resources that might help you. They actually write you know, Hello, Dr. Schwartz, you know I'm writing to you because I read your article on XYZ. I have this article on XYZ, and I think that it would fit in well with your repertoire of articles. That's the kind of thing where I know they did their homework. They actually are not just sending this out to everybody. They're providing value. That's the kind of thing that a contributor would respond to as well as something that appeals to the emotion. So a good article, if you're pitching an article, it's not just, you know promoting your website or product, or whatever you're looking to advertise. It's also having some kind of emotion that's evoking from readers, whether that emotion is joy, excitement, even fear, or you know, FOMO. You know, something that's going to get people to act, that's going to get them to read the whole article. That's what a lot of contributors look for.

Eric Dickmann: 7:35

It's interesting. And do you push people a lot to do blogs directly on LinkedIn? So instead of writing something on your own blog and then just posting a link back to your site on LinkedIn, but actually composing the blog there.

Morissa Schwartz: 7:48

Yeah. Well, you're better doing it on your actual website, but the thing about LinkedIn is you can post that same article from your website on there without hurting your SEO, which is rare because usually it's kind of like Medium where It's not a replacement for your website. It's just another place to put your articles out there. So you can literally put your article on your website on Medium and on LinkedIn without affecting the SEO. Whereas if you took that same article and you published it on your website, and let's say New York, Weekly Times, and Entrepreneur, that's going to hurt your SEO because Google's going to be like, wait a minute, they're copying somebody else's article. But when you're putting out on your own accounts on Medium and LinkedIn, then Google knows. Oh, it's the same person. Okay. They're just putting a few different places. So they're not competitors. You can put them on all of them.

Eric Dickmann: 8:36

And I think that's really good advice because you want more eyeballs on this, right? And there are algorithms that say if you're posting something that links off the site, We're not going to promote that as much, but if you're linking to something that's right on the site, well then we might promote that a little bit more.

Morissa Schwartz: 8:52

Exactly. Yeah.

Eric Dickmann: 8:53

Yeah. So I'm curious too when it comes to writing something more substantial like a book, there are a lot of people out there who are looking to increase their authority in a particular space. And one of the ways that they do that is they write a book and we live in an era where you can self publish or you can get something over to Amazon. It's not that hard in reality to get something out there for the masses to see. But that doesn't mean everybody makes a good author, right? How do you encourage people along that line to write something more substantial, like a book.

Morissa Schwartz: 9:26

Yeah, it depends on the person, it depends on the type of book. I've worked over the past few years with several dozens of professionals who you know, maybe they don't have the time or they don't really know how, they hire a ghost writer. Like you know myself and my team, we've ghost written a lot of books. And that's a great option for busy professionals, but other ones. My advice is you know, take your phone. Literally, this is literally how I wrote my last book. I took my phone, I opened voice memo and I'm gonna drive to and from school. I just recorded myself with my ideas. And then I would come home and type them up and doing that allowed me to save an entire drafting round or editing round because I was basically writing those notes, and editing as I want, since I already had them out there. I was much more honest cause I was walking, it was more stream of conscious. So one of those two options are good for people who don't feel super comfortable writing or they feel writing, some people find writing boring. I think that either hiring ghost writer or dictating yourself and then typing it up. That's the way to go.

Eric Dickmann: 10:31

Yeah, I love that idea. And I've also heard people suggest that especially if you're a blogger and you're creating lots of short form content, take a look at the blogs you've written and you may very well have an outline of what might be a great book, right? If you can take some of those thoughts and compile them together, you may have the headstart of a book already.

Morissa Schwartz: 10:51

A hundred percent. I actually, it's funny that you say that. I had a client who did podcasts and he had all the transcriptions typed up and he sent that to us. He said, can you turn this into a blog please? So we turned it kind of into like a Tim Ferriss Tools of Titans kind of thing, where each chapter, each part was from a different interview. So we would basically summarize the interview and then do little sound bites from it. So podcasts can do that, bloggers can do that, turn those blogs into a book. The only thing is it, Tim Ferriss actually did that too, where he turned blog articles into a book. Did you that you want to give people additional contact? Cause then what's the stop them from just going to your blog and reading that you want to give them something extra. So, you know, new content, new articles, add something to those blogs. You know give them something else as well.

Eric Dickmann: 11:35

I've just been reading a number of books lately. And the author says right up front that really the book was something that was an expanded version of a blog article that they wrote. They stumbled upon an idea that really captivated them and they put it into a blog, but then they said, there's so much more that we can do with this particular concept. And they really expanded it out into something that later became a book and they were great books. So that's not a bad place to start.

Morissa Schwartz: 12:01

No, not at all. No.

Eric Dickmann: 12:03

Well, I think it's really interesting too. When you start talking about the topic of a book, what do you think makes a good book? I've mentioned several times on this show that I love a Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich because I read that book and it is the foundation of what so many business books are today. They're just taking a different spin or adding different stories to some of the concepts that were introduced way back when that was written in the twenties or thirties. So especially when you're looking at things like business books, there aren't a ton of original concepts out there. They're just people kind of telling a story in a slightly different way. So what makes a good hook? What makes your book better than the next guy's book on a similar topic?

Morissa Schwartz: 12:46

Oh, my, and so there are so many things, I mean of course it's subjective. It's an art form. So it's always subjective. But you know, I own a book publishing company as well. And when we get queries, we're looking at a few things, the first and most obvious is making sure that the grammar and syntax and all that is good. And that there aren't a lot of errors because when you see a lot of errors, it just means that the author didn't take the time to put into their book, which tells you, okay. If they flush out their grammar, how are they flushing out their idea? So first off the bat, we want to make sure the grammar syntax is good. But second, you know making sure that they have ideas that are not just rehashing other people's ideas. That they're actually saying something new. So, similar to Think and Grow Rich, Dale Carnegie's book, it's been so many. I have at least three different editions of that book, and you know it's the same idea. At least they're giving him crap. At times you read a book like when I first started my company, we were getting a bunch of queries of vampire books. Cause that was what was really huge at the time. And there are so many vampire books out there. So I wanted a vampire book that did something different and the vampire book we wound up publishing did something completely different. It realized that not only can they think outside the box, there is no box, they weren't creative with it. So I like for books to not be afraid to do something different. Or if you're going to say the same thing as somebody else, do something that's making it unique. We don't need, you know a thousand books all saying the exact same thing. Do your own spin on it. And that's why I think people should always write what they know. You know? I had an author who tried to write something that just was completely out of her element. It was you know, totally out of character. And I gave the advice, write what you know. And she came back with this really personal story and it was great. And I think that people writing about their own, through their own lens is a lot of times a really good thing for us understanding you know, their experience. So.

Eric Dickmann: 14:44

Whether it's a business book or novel, right? Story is still important. And how you tell that story is important and the anecdotes and what you add to it that really bring those concepts to life. And sometimes you pick up a book and you can scan through the table of contents and you're like, well, I really don't even need to read this book. The concepts are pretty clear here. But then there are others. You just can't wait to dive in because the way that they're explained in the stories really bring those concepts to life. And so there's no substitution for story, no matter what you're writing.

Morissa Schwartz: 15:13

Hundred percent.

Eric Dickmann: 15:14

Yeah. So I'm kind of interested to hear about your story as well. You know, you're an entrepreneur, you're an author, now you're helping other authors. You've got your own book company. So how did this all happen for you? How did this unfold? Where, what was your first sort of writing assignment that got you some notoriety?

Morissa Schwartz: 15:32

Yeah. Well, I started writing,I was 12 years old and I had my first article published in Discovery Girls Magazine, and I started getting letters from other girls, saying how my story helped them, but talk about, you know, this was before, you know, there was Facebook and all that, like you couldn't easily get feedback. So it was a really big deal, me getting letters in the mail. And I was like, wow, if this is making an impact, I keep writing. So the next year, I became an advisor to Scholastic, when they would have different articles come out I would get my input and they would put like little soundbites by me in their Scholastic magazine. Again, I was getting like letters from other kids and like, this is so cool. So it just talk about, makes you want to keep writing. So fast forward to high school, I wrote my first book, I self-published it. And my friends were all getting jobs at the mall that they were miserable with. And I said, my gosh, I don't want to do something I'm miserable with, what can I do instead of a job at the mall? And my mother suggested freelance editing books. And you know, since I had just published my own book, I said all right, let's try this. And I started and it went really well. I edited a children's horror book. She was very happy with it, she recommended me to a friend who recommended me to another friend. And before I knew it going into college, I had a small copywriting and copy editing business, and at the same time I wrote and published my first traditionally published book. Um, and I just kept growing my freelance business, and then I started my own book publishing company after I learned. Okay, so I had my book traditionally published, I've self published the book. I feel like I understand the editing process, the publishing process, let's start this company. So I started my book publishing company and then continued to freelance. And then the freelancing just got to be so much, you know people are requesting, Hey, I love your writing. Can you do SEO? Can you do ads? That I started building up a team and then that turned into Dr. Rissy's Writing and Marketing. So now fast forward, like 10 years later, and I have the seam. So on one end, we do 360 marketing, so SEO ads, PR, and social media. And then on my other side, I still have the book publishing company where we've published 115 books over the past six years.

Eric Dickmann: 17:46

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. That's quite a journey and it sounds like at least for the first part of it. It was a lot of word of mouth and referral. It wasn't sort of SEO and organic reach, and doing all the kinds of things that we help our clients do today. But it sounds like just being good at what you do, getting that word of mouth, getting those referrals really helped you grow. I'm kind of curious now that you are a business owner, you've got a team, you're managing really multiple businesses, what's that like for you? So many entrepreneurs, don't like sort of the management side of it. They just like to be entrepreneurs. Where do you fall in all that?

Morissa Schwartz: 19:09

Yeah. Luckily because of the team, I do have managers that help oversee. There's still a heck of a lot of work to be done and to always do and to oversee. And, you know, I think like my I'm very lucky because my parents are both entrepreneurs. And my first day, when I ncorporated my company, my father said, every single day something is going to go wrong in your business. And I was like, yeah, right, dad, that sounds like a nightmare. And now I'm happy if only one thing goes wrong, like, it's just like, when you're managing people, there's always, always, always something. So having that knowledge and him preparing me for that was very, very helpful. So yeah, my days are usually very busy, but I am happy that I have a strong team behindme and at my side and you know working with me to make sure that everything goes as smoothly as possible.

Eric Dickmann: 19:58

You know a lot of businesses need help in their writing. And so they outsource some of it to an SEO team or professional team, but one of the challenges always is getting those team members to write in the right voice, right? To write in the voice of the company owner, if you're ghost writing to write in the author's voice, when you work with your team or you work with clients, what are the things that you look for? What are things that you do to try to capture that voice of the client or the author that you're working for?

Morissa Schwartz: 20:28

Yeah, I actually learned this. So one of my, I almost say my one of my first big projects when I got my team was writing eBooks for Microsoft. We wrote their eBooks and tweets. And what I learned from them was they have this great system of subject matter experts. So when they hired us, they said, okay, here's this person they're in charge of this, this and this. You should interview them when you're writing about IOT, here's this person. And they just gave us this list of SMEs. And it was brilliant. So now when we're writing, we know what to request. Hey, can we talk to your subject matter expert in this? Can we talk to, you know this? And it's very, very helpful to kind of have a plan of who to talk to about what. And having questions prepared and you know, really taking the time to talk to the people who know more about the subject that you're writing about than you do, so that you can learn it, absorb it, and then write it in a way that's going to appeal to their audience.

Eric Dickmann: 21:27

I love that because I've seen that with many companies is they outsource some of the writing, but clearly you can't expect somebody who's a writer to have intimate knowledge of your particular industry, or your product, or whatever. And that often comes across in the tweets or the articles that are written, they're written sort of from an outsider perspective. When you're trying to present yourself as is kind of an inside voice. And I love the fact that Microsoft gave you those resources. So you could have somebody to fall back on and say, explain this to me or you know, what should I be saying here about this particular thing? I wish more companies would do that.

Morissa Schwartz: 22:03

Oh, it was great. Yeah.

Eric Dickmann: 22:04

What I know your company has also gotten into podcasting, in terms of helping your guests or your clients get on podcasts. And I'm curious, you're on this podcast today. How have you found podcasting as an important new channel? Not only for yourself, but for clients.

Morissa Schwartz: 22:22

Yeah. Oh, podcasts are great for so many reasons. I mean first of all, the SEO benefit. So actually even more than that, podcasters are kind of like influencers. So when a client comes to me, who's like a B2B and they're like, oh, I want to hire influencers. They say, why don't you just go on podcasts? Because podcasts just will do what influencers do. They're going to put you on their social media. And usually their social media is sizable. You know, they're going to talk to you, shout you out. I mean podcasters do work as influencers in a lot of ways, and that helps your SEO. You're on their social, usually you're on their website. These things are you know, indexed and if you allowed them on, you know, Google news, all these different places. So you're able to be found more, more easily. That's always great, yeah. So for my clients, they're thrilled. I have a lot of author clients. And the other thing is there are podcasts for basically every genre. So I just got off the phone with an author who is a Christian, who writes about love. So he goes on Christian podcasts, he goes on love podcasts, he goes on author podcasts. Like all these little sub genres, he's thrilled. They cover him and he's able to find his audience more. And personally, I mean, being on podcast, I've met a lot of amazing people, worked with a lot of amazing people through them. It's great for networking, it's great for everything really. It's just a wonderful, wonderful tool.

Eric Dickmann: 23:48

And it also helps you better define your value proposition, right? When you're having to get on a show, talk about what you do, talk about your areas of expertise. You start to get that pitch down the more you refine it. You know, we're still not quite back to where things were being able to go and do speaking slots at public events. And podcasting is a great way to sort of get your message out there and also practice it and refine it and seeing what resonates with the host.

Morissa Schwartz: 24:14

So true. Definitely true. Well the thing is, I mean with everybody being inside, podcasts have been great. Like I used to always do chamber events and networking events and stuff, podcasts became that for me now. So yeah.

Eric Dickmann: 24:28

Yeah, I completely agree. You know, although listenership went down a little bit during the COVID pandemic, I think because a lot of people weren't in their cars and they weren't listening in some of the ways that they were before. We've certainly seen a renewed interest in podcasting. And now that some of the big players have gotten more into it, Apple is certainly reinvesting in podcasting. Spotify has made some big acquisitions, Amazon, et cetera. So I can only see that this is going to grow, especially with some of the announcements that we've heard about what Facebook is going to be doing as a way to sort of bring in their audience to podcasters. It's going to be an exciting year I think.

Morissa Schwartz: 25:02

Yeah. And I think Clubhouse also made people realize audio. People want to hear audio.

Eric Dickmann: 25:08

They do and they want interaction. So it's great. I'm a huge fan of Lunch Club. I get on Lunch Club all the time, and it's the same kind of thing. It's a way to practice your pitch, it's a way to interact with other people, and I think the more tools that come around that that help us be able to do that the better it is for our businesses and our own value propositions.

Morissa Schwartz: 25:27

Yeah, absolutely.

Eric Dickmann: 25:28

Moriissa, as we kind of wrap up here today. I'd love it. If you could tell people a little bit more about where they could find you, about where they could find your writing services, and your book publishing company as well.

Morissa Schwartz: 25:38

Sure. So my writing and social media services are available on drrissy.com. And my book publishing company is genzpublishing.org. Oh, and I'm available pretty much everywhere on social media under my name, Morissa Schwartz. That's Morris with an O or Dr. Rissy.

Eric Dickmann: 25:55

I love Gen Z. So what is the focus of the publishing company? Is it mostly fiction, poetry? What do you like to focus on there?

Morissa Schwartz: 26:02

We've published pretty much every kind of book, but our biggest books are young adult and new age. But our main theme that drives all of our books together is innovative. You know, saying something, different saying, being topical.Most of our books are pretty topical and that's why I call it Gen Z. I call it Gen Z before Generation Z was a thing.

Eric Dickmann: 26:26

Was a thing?

Morissa Schwartz: 26:28

Yeah. I meant it to be like the innovative generation then here, you know, here comes Gen Z, like, oh, we're an actual cherry. But yeah, Gen Z to me just means being innovative.

Eric Dickmann: 26:38

Yeah, I love that. You know, you've got a fascinating story. I love to hear about the path of an entrepreneur and especially as their business expands and they get into other areas. And that certainly seems to be what happened to you, and I appreciate your insights too on writing and the real possibilities that are out there for entrepreneurs who kind of take their writing seriously.

Morissa Schwartz: 26:58

Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure.

Eric Dickmann: 27:00

Thank you very much.

Morissa Schwartz: 27:02

Thank you.

Eric Dickmann: 27:05

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.