Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I’m here with Erica, who’s going to give herself a short introduction and then a much longer intro into the things she’s done in her career that should make us trust her as an expert.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Hi, I’m Erica D’Arcangelo. I am the CEO of Love Content Development and we are a full service marketing agency. We’ve been in business about 14 years and I own several other marketing companies. I have one called Create One, which is a video production company and V12 Strategies, which is a marketing technology company.
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From Employee to Entrepreneur
Jeremy Rivera: All right, so kind of spread across the board there. Where did that come out of? Was that, did you come out fresh-faced out of college or did you go and intern at a company and develop some of these skills in marketing that led to opening the agency? And did you, were you the original founder of these agencies or do you have partners that you’ve kind of developed this with?
Erica D’Arcangelo: Absolutely. So I actually went to school for marketing and I got a job doing marketing for private health care and this is back in 2001. I really learned through that job every facet of marketing whether it was HTML coding websites or when social media first began and really how to use these different marketing tools.
So then in about 2013 I actually was a single mom and I had a toddler. You know, she was, I think, about three at the time. And I decided to launch my own agency. And I really, at that point, wanted flexibility. I had really learned a lot about marketing. And I started my own agency and started, you know, working and having contracts with different companies.
And now fast forward here, and I’ve had, you know, worked with about 800 companies. And between all the companies, probably have generated almost $300 million with all the different marketing contracts.
The first company has been there the longest. And then I think we opened the other company about four years ago, was my husband and I. And then my husband and I launched the video production company about a year ago.
Scaling from Freelancer to Real Agency
Jeremy Rivera: Interesting. I’m curious how you’re looking at that as like scaling up, you know, because sometimes you know the “I’ve launched my own agency” is a fancy way of saying “I’m a freelancer and I do like 90% of the consulting and maybe have a few subcontractors for this or that or third-party tools,” but what’s been your experience of actually like growing that?
Hiring people, finding talent, building workflows that continue to work in the face of an industry that is continually… I don’t know, it’s like Phoenix-like, right? Like 2001, SEO is dead. 2005, SEO is dead. 2010, SEO is dead. 2015, SEO is dead. Featured snippets comes down, SEO is dead. You know, Chat GPT becomes big, AI overviews, SEO is dead. It’s like, the more that it dies, the more that it lives.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah. So it’s funny, it’s a good question and it’s a great analogy. So when we first started out, of course, it was just me and it was literally like I was a freelancer and then I had a couple people. And then I like to say we kind of became like a real agency in the end of 2017, beginning of 2018. And that’s when we really started to put like our structure of our company in.
We created an organizational chart of the different people that we would need to hire and the different divisions of the organization and who is in charge of who and we really started hiring we opened an office and we really became like quote unquote a real company at that point in time.
I think it’s just one of those things of like, you have to go through it and you have to learn it because there were so many things along the way of like building that company that you don’t really know until you go through it, like with hiring people and with keeping people and retaining clients and processes and organization.
It’s not just, you go from like, “I do marketing for people” to, “okay, now I have to run this business.” And this business is its own machine. It’s not just like, you’re doing SEO for some clients. You’re running a business, you have employees, you have taxes you have, you know, to keep an office up. There’s all these different things that you go into when you go from freelancing to really just running and having the business.
Remote vs. Office: The Hybrid Evolution
Jeremy Rivera: So in-house, in an office, remote, you know, we’ve seen quite a journey from, you know, all professions are basically, even the concept of like, you work remotely was a joke in like 1980s… but that’s really changed. And I’ve seen it kind of vacillate between professionals really liking it, a subculture of management minded people really hating it and kind of, you know, there’s a balancing act I’m sure of like striking…
So what’s your opinion? I’ve talked a bit, but I’m curious on the work-life balance remote in-house with your three companies.
Erica D’Arcangelo: You know, I really think it depends on your goals. Like back before COVID, I would say office. You have to be in an office. Then COVID happened. And then it was like, you really had no choice but to figure out how to run it remotely.
And I have some clients that run multimillion dollar companies and all their people are remote. And then I have other clients that are like, “we insist on an office. We have to have everyone here and ready.” And I think it really depends on who you hire and what you have.
Right now, we have a combination. We have a studio and we film at our studio and we have employees in our studio and we have it like that but we also have some flexibility. Like I have employees in the UK who were in Tampa, Florida. But I want the employee in the UK because she’s an amazing creative collaborator and she’s one of the best people for the job.
Again, I think it’s just a flexibility. There’s certain positions that are like, “okay, this is a better, you know, in the office position.” And then maybe we have a team of people. So I would say right now we’re hybrid, but we went from being completely remote freelance to an office to now hybrid. So we have gone through every single facet of this journey of like how you work. And I will say, I really like the flexibility of being able to figure out both.
Bringing Back the Webmaster Mentality
Jeremy Rivera: I think hybrid is a fantastic model. I think hybrid really is kind of the model for digital marketing in general now. I don’t think that, I said this in a previous interview, I think that the golden age of SEO as Google reverse engineering is over… I would dare to say either one of two things. Let’s go back to Webmaster.
You know, 1998, like, I’m the webmaster. I’m bringing it back because it’s interconnected, you know, it solves all of those problems. Yes, SEOs, SEOs, Geo is Geo, AISO, we gotta figure out all those things as the webmaster for this company, because we’re now interconnected in looking at the organic side and connecting to these email campaigns and thinking about the impact of our influencers…
Let’s not argue about whether SEO is dead or whether GEO is a more appropriate term. Let’s just face the fact that we can’t make an industry singularly now off of the back of organic traffic from Google. We gotta be more interconnected, and why not, you know, go back with some vintage, put on the bell bottoms, and become a Webmaster again?
Erica D’Arcangelo: I remember those days of the webmaster and the HTML sites and the backlinks and that was before the Google penalties and it was such a different landscape in the marketing area. It was before social media came into play.
What I tell people now, because I’ve heard that too, “SEO is dead” or “AISCO,” it’s like SEO is not dead. There’s just a lot more elements to it than there ever was. It takes a lot more. You have all these different pieces of this puzzle and they all work together and you have to figure out how they work together just like you know doing on page SEO and creating content but then there’s an element of YouTube and video content and there’s an element of social media content and there’s all these different elements that go into this piece of content rather than just like throwing it on the page with the keywords and just sort of throwing some backlinks in that direction and kind of expecting it to rank. It just doesn’t work that way anymore.
Multi-Channel Audience Acquisition
Jeremy Rivera: It’s almost more either traffic acquisition, audience, I think audience acquisition is closer to the true goal now and audience acquisition and maintenance with revenue goals in mind… it’s now it’s multi-channel, right? Where we’re looking at the outcome of revenue from our email program. We’re looking at the outcome of our influencer campaigns…
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting because I think you have like your foundational SEO, which is like your website, your Google listing, your social media assets, like you have all this foundational, but then after that, you have like almost like your promotional, your influencer, and that kind of builds up the foundational that has to be in place so that when that person sees it and then they do a search and they look for you that you have all these ranking assets that are already set up that are already optimized and you already have everything in order to be found.
The Power of Data and Unexpected Success
Jeremy Rivera: It’s like findability is, you know, it’s the proof of your authenticity…
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, you’re definitely right about that. I mean, the other thing that’s interesting is that, and the thing I really do love about SEO and marketing is the data. Like, I’ve had people in the past be like, “that’s not gonna rank or that’s not gonna do anything.” You can’t say that unless you put it up there and you look at the data. And that’s the thing that’s so cool about kind of this area is like, okay, did it work or didn’t it work?
I mean, I’ve been doing marketing for my family’s pizzeria for a long time… And it was like, what’s gonna rank here? And the weirdest thing, people cutting pizza, ASMR. We have a video with 64 million views. Like, who would have thought that the simplicity of a video that you can take a million times in a row is gonna rank that much, but you don’t know until you put it out there and you research and you look at what the data tells you to do.
Local Community Building Through Digital
Jeremy Rivera: I was talking with Michael McDougall, the right thing agency earlier and he was talking about for his pool cleaning client like Riverstone. We’re just going to do like ASMR pool cleaning videos, you know, cause I’ve seen it really weird joke… there’s a huge audience for just simple things being done right thoroughly over and over as video content…
Matt Brooks of SEO Territ brought this up he’s like “okay if you want to rank locally go and find the most popular pizza places and follow all of the people that follow that local pizza place.” And repeat that for every unique business that’s truly in your community… if you start following those people, you start getting follows back from people who are genuinely in your community, then if you’re putting out something that’s local or interesting, then you start to build a geographically specific audience that can echo back.
There’s nothing about that that’s necessarily SEO. There’s no link building. There’s any written content to optimize. But that type of campaign is exactly what I would recommend now of some audience or community outreach aspect to bolster brand visibility and signal for a local business.
Creating Content Across Platforms
Jeremy Rivera: The interesting thing I challenge you with is how passive are we with this versus what we create with this laptop that I’m pointing at that you can’t see.
Erica D’Arcangelo: You know, I’d say again, it’s about equal. As a content creator, there is content that I create directly on my phone, like with social media. When I do my TikTok posts, I do them on my phone. Really for all the accounts, and I mean, I have multiple, like in Instagram, I have 10 Instagram accounts I’m creating content for. I have a bunch of TikTok accounts, and I’m doing that all on my phone.
Now, YouTube, for example, I’m doing that on my computer and like, you know, I have a podcast on recording my podcast on Riverside. I’m editing it. I’m pushing it out. But again, I send the clips to my phone for TikTok.
My favorite platform, which, you know, I checked TikTok, not TikTok YouTube. I checked YouTube on my phone multiple times a day because I have the studio where I can check all the analytics and all the data. First thing I do in the morning is I check YouTube studio to figure out how much traffic did I get yesterday from YouTube.
The Overwhelming Nature of Modern Marketing
Jeremy Rivera: It seems scary. I feel a tremendous sense of empathy for small business, true small business owners, because there are now so many things to navigate. There’s such an incredible varied checklist… It’s just a lot.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, you almost these days have to either be a marketing expert or be able to afford to have someone who is a marketing expert because there are so many facets of marketing. It changes every single day. There’s a new thing almost every single day and it can also be one of those things and I find this a lot with clients is like what it’s actually going to take to hit the goal is different than what the client thinks it’s going to take.
It’s like if you go on a diet. And in your mind you think, “it’s only gonna take two weeks and I’ll just go to the gym three times and maybe I’ll just stop drinking soda. Like just easy peasy.” But then at the end of the two weeks you’re like, “I didn’t lose the weight that I wanted.” Because really it’s gonna take you three months and you’re gonna need to go to the gym five days a week and you’re gonna need to completely change your diet and you’re gonna need to walk 10,000 steps.
And so this kind of like misestimation of the effort is I think a lot of the reasons why people think that marketing doesn’t work or why it’s kind of a hard subject to kind of face is because you have to really look at like, what is it actually gonna take for me to sell this much through marketing? How much marketing is it gonna take and how long is it gonna take and what am I gonna need to do to really do this?
AI: Tool or Crutch?
Jeremy Rivera: You know, as these new fields open up of, you know, chat GPT, it’s an unknown variant, an unknown and unproven channel. I did just see my Icelandic e-commerce guy posted, hey, $30,000 in sales of high ticket e-commerce purchases sourced and tracked to chat GPT conversations…
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, I totally get that 100%. I mean, AI is a tool that makes really things faster and easier, and it’s an amazing research tool, but there’s certain things I think it has to be really used responsibly. And you have to know it’s not always gonna give you something that’s a fact. What it says isn’t always 100% true, because I see things where I’ll put a prompt in for something and I’ll be like, “well, that’s not even what happened or that’s not, that’s not, that’s inaccurate.”
But you have to know that, you you as a human, you know, use it for time saving, use it to help you with, to fortify your efforts. But at the end of the day, you’re the one kind of moving the dial on everything.
The Magic of Modern SEO Tools
Jeremy Rivera: both as practitioners in marketing… we have a big responsibility to create systems that account for the fallibility of chat GPT. It’s your most popular, but least accurate employee, you know, it comes to facts about your company might literally make up URLs…
You know, there’s so many little checkbox things in SEO that are becoming easier in certain ways. Like internal linking, trialing out this tool, Magic Rinku. It’s using, it ingested the whole WordPress site. It found all my orphan content and it’s suggesting the other articles that should internally link to it… I’m like, this would take literally, you know, 20 minutes for one post to build like three internal links… But now that now I can click those buttons much faster do the same thing have a better output…
If I showed, you know, 2007 SEO Jeremy, as I started, like, my God, this is like, this is black magic. Like this is technology so advanced that it’s like magic. But now what happens when we hit the point of technological ubiquity, where we become inured to the magic of these things?
Erica D’Arcangelo: I mean, it can be very enchanting and it can become very, like you can be, feel like that very easily. But again, I think it’s one of those things where you have to look at like, it’s a differentiation thing of like, your tool that you’re using for the interlinking is phenomenal. And that’s something that you wanna use it for. If you’re writing a thesis on marketing, you may be able to get data and research and get help with different, how the article sounds, but you have to be responsible for what you’re saying in there.
The Human Element in an AI World
Jeremy Rivera: I think that’s true and it’s part of the concept I think of the downside of AI and AI generated content, LLMs, it’s mathematical in its nature… the inaccuracies, the hallucinations, come from when we allow it, that extra leeway of creativity, a leaving objective fact. So only you and I can actually generate, have information gain. It’s the compounding of our own personal experiences within an expertise context shared between us in a human conversation.
So I think this podcast, other podcasts, video podcasts, conversations, humans are going to become more valuable as people realize how regurgitative, how repetitive AI and LLM based content truly is. And it has to be.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah. I think the internet too is probably at some point going to purge itself because I think at one point it’s going to get very out of hand and then it’s gonna get to a point where it almost has to do it because there’s so much there that it will have no option. And I think we’re in a very interesting time of technology. I absolutely love technology. It saves so much time.
But on the other hand, I’m an author and I have books that I write, both literary fiction, young adult, and children’s books, but that’s not something that I necessarily use technology for. That is something that I, as an artist, would feel very compromised if I used AI for something that I was putting out as my own work.
Human-Certified Content
Jeremy Rivera: Right. No, that’s definitely true. And I think I’m going patent a keyboard that does fingerprint tracking and does, like, puts it on the blockchain for each letter to confirm that this was a human generated article. That a human with human, the specific human actually typed all of these letters into this document. I think that’s going to be, you know, human certified content is probably going to be the next, you know, organic label, you know, it’s like organic food, non-GMO, but for our content, it really has to be.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, yeah, humanly written because we, I mean, I still have a team of writers and we have some clients that are like, “I only use AI.” Okay, fine. I have other clients who are like, “I never want to use AI. I want the human writers to write the content. I want you guys to do the SEO. I want you to post it.” And we do it like that because we have customers that that’s how they want it done and they’re still getting really good results.
I don’t see necessarily a change in results of someone using AI. Now I have seen a little bit with AI content where it will go up a lot at the beginning and then it will trail off. That’s one of the trends that I’ve really seen just studying it a little bit, which I don’t see as much with human content.
Again, I think it’s one of those things that we talked about at the beginning where it’s not just content and SEO, you have an entire arsenal of tools that you need to use now, which are sort of SEO support tools.
The Icarus Effect of AI Content
Jeremy Rivera: I think it’s the, I call it the Icarus effect. Usually those are, you know, they’re the SEO bros or they come forward and they’re like, “here’s my case study. You know, look at, I published 30,000 commercial real estate articles. Like look at all my traffic.” And then you follow that domain and check like three weeks later and it drops off… So the story there is don’t go crazy. Like, you know, moderation. You know, there are ways that we can use these tools responsibly.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we’ll do a strategy where it’s like, you know, we humanly write our blog articles and really it’s, you know, information and businesses that we really want to study the marketing and we really want to put out something that’s really valuable to people. And that’s how we do our videos. And so I really lead with, you know, how can this content benefit the reader and how can we be creative with it? Not like “how can we publish a million posts this month?”
Creating Real Value Through Authentic Content
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, it really is kind of going back to one of two things. Either go and record your conversation with your very passionate tile salesman, because they do that all day every day and they’re gonna say, you know, “I’m so tired of people not knowing that you don’t put tile over fireplaces.”… But it’s a real world issue and it makes the website not just a fishing hook, but an octopus with arms reaching out and pulling things back…
Make your website purposeful and if you’re doing… You know, if you’re a law office, you know, think about those long term, more long term value cases… Those aren’t things that are necessarily going to have any sort of search volume, but they are things that are definitely, “okay, how do I finish the bail bond process? I don’t understand.” That sort of clarity is what is making your website have longer value than just a fishing hook to lure them in in the first place.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is a place, I when someone Googles you, the first thing usually they find is your website. So it’s like they have to easily within three to five seconds know exactly what you do. And that’s what I see a lot with websites is people will go to the site and they’ll be like, “what do these people do? Like I don’t understand.”
And then also having just, like you said, simple navigation where they’re really answering people’s questions. One cool tool that you probably know all about is the People Always Ask, the Google suggested questions. Those are really nice because you could literally go look at what questions people are asking, or SEMrush has a really nice list for almost anything you search. And you could do a knowledge base where people can very easily search any question and get the question answered on your website. And I found really with attorneys like you said and even just health and medical clients this is like a really good resource for people to have.
Understanding Your Audience Through Direct Research
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I love also asked.com. I interviewed their founder, super smart guy, Mark Williams Cook… just understanding that Google itself classifies queries as part of its ranking, as part of the visual part of rendering the SERP is incredibly helpful to think through. Okay, well, if I’m putting myself into my client’s shoes, maybe I should just actually, I don’t know, interview my ideal guest, interview my ideal customer and ask them what were the qualifying things that led you to find? Like what were you actually looking for? What were the problems? Record that and then turn that into content and answers those things. Like that should be one task that whether you’re an SEO, a webmaster, you know, digital marketing agency, whatever on your list should be getting a true client interview.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Yeah, absolutely. We talk about a lot and we use a lot, you know, survey data. The best way to know what people want is just to ask them.
And we have, you know, we have SEO tools which are amazing, like SEMrush. I mean, YouTube has it within their trends where they’ll tell you what people are searching for. Google also has their trends that you can look and see what is a relevant topic, what are people searching for, and you can really craft your content based on, in your industry, what do people really want to know?
Where to Find Erica
Jeremy Rivera: I love it. As to kind of wrap up here, let people know where they can find you, where they can follow you. You’re a prolific author apparently, so name drop a few of your books and I’ll make sure that it all gets added to the show notes.
Erica D’Arcangelo: Thank you so much. You know for anything marketing it’s lovecontent development.com but I recently launched this author career which it’s funny enough it has nothing to do with marketing it’s about pizza. My family opened a pizza place back in 1960 and my first book became an Amazon bestseller it’s about my grandfather’s journey as an Italian immigrant to open this pizzeria.
So if you search you know Erica D’Arcangelo or “A Story About Pizza” or Pizza Story Podcast that’s probably the easiest quickest way to find me just because I spend about half my time now in the pizza world.
