28: Build Your Kiosk in The Mall With Morissa Schwartz

20
Mar

Morissa Schwartz is the owner of Dr. Rissy’s Writing and Marketing, an SEO, social media management, and PR company. She is also a multiple Amazon best-selling author and the proprietor of GenZ Publishing. We discuss how to beat your competition using SEO and the importance of having a strong social media presence. 

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Build Your Kiosk in The Mall With Morissa Schwartz

Our guest is Morissa Schwartz, who is the owner of Dr. Rissy Writing and Marketing, which is an SEO, social media management, and PR company. I’m their latest client, by the way. She is also the proprietor of Gens Publishing, which helps new authors launch their books. She herself is a multiple Amazon bestseller author. She holds a master’s in PR, doctorate in arts and letters. And I’m great to have you on the show. Welcome.

Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be here.

That’s awesome to have you, Morissa. So tell me, how does one become a PR and someone with a writing background, how does one become an entrepreneur? That’s pretty special, I think.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it all just kind of went hand in hand. So when I was in high school, I was looking to, you know, I loved writing. I had self-published a book in high school and I loved writing. And I wanted to do something. You know, all my friends were getting jobs at the mall that they hated, that weren’t going to impact their future careers. And I wanted to be able to start working on my passion, which was writing. So my mother found an article in one of her women’s magazines about freelancing.

And here I was, a 17-year-old, and I’m like, I could try this, so I went on to a freelance website and I edited a children’s horror book and it went so well that she recommended me to another author friend who recommended me to another author friend and before I knew it, I had a nice line of clients that I was able to edit their books for and that led me to then, clients asked me if I could copyright for them, so I started copywriting, which led to them asking me if I could do SEO because nowadays, to be a successful copywriter, you need to have SEO on there because if it’s going to be online, you need it to be findable.

So I just kept freelance writing and built that into a business. And I realized once people want SEO, well, social media goes hand in hand with SEO. So I hired people whose expertise was in certain types of social media and graphic design and just built up the team that way. And PR of course goes so hand in hand with writing because, you know, you write a story, it’s good, you need it to get out there, you need somebody to see it. So PR is, you know, pitching it, pitching it to different periodicals and hoping that they publish it. So a big part of writing is PR.

Yeah. And this is such a big topic because I know many of my clients, I personally, that’s why I hired you, your firm, because, you know, we as entrepreneurs, we struggle with how do we get the word out. We know that we have a voice, but how do we do that and do our building our business and serving our clients at the same time. And I’ve been very, for a long time, very reticent about how am I going to allow other people to speak in my name and how does that even this even works. So, can you just give me a little bit of the psychology of this thing and the philosophy of Dr. Rissy, how do you get someone’s, how do you amplify someone’s persona through writing and through social media and PR?

Yeah, there are a number of things. The first is research though. Almost everybody on my team has an advanced degree. Well, everybody on my team has an advanced degree. The question is how advanced? I mean, a lot of us have masters, things like that. So through that experience, we learned how to do research very well. I mean, when you’re going for your masters, and when I was going for my doctorate, I mean, 90% of our work was just doing research and looking online.

So by being able to do that, we can adapt very well to learning about somebody’s topics, becoming a subject matter expert for them, and writing about it in their tone. But we also make sure that we have an onboarding process where we do ask them certain questions like about their tone. So I have some clients where they want to only remain professional, no jokes, just complete suit and tie kind of writing. Whereas others like, yeah, let’s have a personality, let’s be humorous.

So we like to find out what the client, what kind of tone they want to have through our writing and our outreach. So we make sure that we do that. We also have in the past for certain clients done interviews with other subject matter experts in the field. So we wrote a lot of white papers and e-books for HP and we must have interviewed six different HP employees just trying to understand the technicalities of the IOT that we were writing about. Whereas, you know, research, just research alone wasn’t enough. We need to actually talk to those engineers and learn, okay, this is how it works. So sometimes it’s interviewing, most of the time it’s just a lot of research.

And then there’s a little bit of give and take where then once we write, we send it to the client and we say, okay, you know, we try our best. We do our research. We wrote these. What do you think? And if it’s in the client’s voice and they’re like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. It’s approved. But if they say, you know what, in my industry, we wouldn’t call it a bolt, we would call it a screw. Like little things like that, sometimes they’ll correct and then we know for the next time, okay, that’s how we’re gonna do it. And we have clients that have been with us for four years, we don’t even have to show them the post thing, but usually beginning clients, just to get their tone, there’s a little bit of give and take.

Yeah, that’s fascinating. The way you explain this, it reminds me one of my clients who is a government contract, actually a company that helps government contractors get more business. So, I essentially write proposals for them and the pitches and help them win business. And one of their core values, they have five core values, and one of their core values is engage with content, engages with content. So, they were looking for, they are looking for people to hire who has this desire, maybe it’s curiosity or, you know, we call it the high fact finder people who have to get all the details in the background of things. They want people who immerse themselves in the raw material of that particular business to really understand their content, to engage with it, and then they can write these superb proposals that will have been very competitive bids.

Engaging with content is a core value for successful writing. Immersing oneself in the raw material of a business is key to producing competitive and compelling content. Click To Tweet

Yeah, that’s great. That is awesome.

So how does one become a great writer? How do you, I mean, how do these people train to be able to do that, to be able to do the research and kind of get into the skin of other people and speak with their voice? What’s the process there?

Yeah, I mean, everybody has their own process, their own way of doing it. For me, and the advice that one of my favorite professors ever, it was actually my first week of grad school, and he was this very mild-mannered, quiet professor, but somebody said, well, how do I get over writer’s block? And he had this attitude, he’s like, who do you think you are? Get over yourself to get over writer’s block, that what you write is never going to be perfect, but just get it down on paper, and then you can edit and improve it.

And that stuck with me, and that’s kind of what I’ve told every writer I know, just write it, and then you can edit it over and over. Something else, my personal thing, and not every writer’s like this, but I love voice recording myself. So if I have an idea, or if I’m working on something, I will voice record it, and then I will sit at my computer, play it, and type it. And while I’m doing that, I’m self-editing, because then I’m eliminating a step of the editing process. And I tend to, if I’m talking, I’m being a lot more honest and open than if I’m just like typing something out where you can risk sounding a little robotic.

So I love audio recording and writing based on that. But the research is super important and knowing where to research, where to look. Google is great, but there are other platforms that you can find mainly through your local library or if you are somebody who has access to university databases, there are a lot of wonderful tools where you can find just lots of articles that aren’t indexed on Google, things in like older periodicals, older research, things like that.

Of course, Google is a fine resource for something simple, but I’ve used EBSCOhost for years, too, to if I’m working on, you know, like that HP IOT article, you use that and find all the scientific, you know, you go into Epscoho Science, boom, there it is. Yeah, so all those are really helpful, outlining also. You know, I’m a voice recorder, but I know people who they’ll just write an entire outline and then basically just fill in the blanks for themselves. That’s another great way to do it.

Voice recording can be a powerful tool for writers, fostering a more honest and open expression of ideas that transcends the risk of sounding robotic. Click To Tweet

Yeah, that’s awesome, and what I find very useful when I want to write something is the mind-mapping technique. So, you just sit with a piece of paper and sometimes I get the inspiration in the evening when I’m very tired. Maybe I have a beer and I can loosen up and then I just start mind-mapping and I can have a whole idea or a chapter of a book mapped out and I just have to follow a number of the sequence of the ideas and I just go through and then I can, it’s my process. I can then write my stuff. You know, the other thing I wanted to mention, you mentioned the writer’s block. A lot of people talk about writer’s block. And one of my favorite songs is from Van Morrison, the songwriter. I don’t know if you know that song.

I know.

I am the songwriter and I can do it whenever I need to, even if I’m hurting, I can do it. And the checks comes in the mail. And I love that song because it really talks to the professionalism. And if you are professional, you just do it. That’s pretty cool. So going back to your business and how you build that up, I mean, you’ve got a lot of people now, right? Your website, I mean, I saw like 15 or 20 people and you’ve got more actually on LinkedIn. So how did you build your business? Did you have some kind of a framework in mind, did you use some ideas and processes to build it out?

Yeah, so I had this client that I worked with for four and a half years and he taught me something that has really stuck with me and it’s that whenever you hire for a position you should always hire three people, you know, for a trial. You give them a paid trial job and of those three, one is always going to be mediocre, one’s going to be okay, and one is going to be really good. So you keep the one who’s really good, you have the one who’s okay on standby should you ever need like an extra set of hands, and then you say thank you very much to the mediocre one.

And that has really helped me. So you know, in growing my business, being able to do that and give like trial, paid trial work, because there are a lot of people also, and I’ve had people come to me, we literally just had this yesterday where they asked us, Oh, can you do this example work for me? And, you know, in return, maybe you’ll get my business. No, we don’t do that. That’s not, you know, but I always make sure I pay them to incentivize them and make sure that, you know, they’re fair and yeah, you can really evaluate the work well by doing that. That’s one practice I found really to work also getting people who are referred.

So I’ve tried hiring people off of places like Indeed and stuff like that, and I’ve found some really great applicants. But when somebody is referred, then they are trying to live up to the person who referred them’s expectations. So it’s not just them that they’re trying to make proud. They also don’t want to make that person or hurt the relationship with that person. So people who are referred have done really well. And then third, I’ve hired a lot of people that I was a fan of previously. So I’ve hired several people where, you know, I’m an avid reader myself, so there are a lot of writers that I’ve followed for years, and I’ve had the pleasure of being able to hire some of them.

You know, being a fan, like there’s one person, I was a fan, I would write fan letters to him in high school, like, oh my gosh, I loved your article so much, just as a fan, and I was following him on social media. He started writing for us, so that’s like the neatest thing in the world, where you can get somebody who you legitimately know their work, you know, then you don’t have to do the test and then you just know, okay, they’re awesome, I’m gonna work with them. And then a few people on the team are just folks I’ve known my whole life who I would trust with anything, who, you know, got into the same industry as me. I went to school with some of them. And yeah, just having that trust is super important too.

Referrals are a powerful source of talent. Individuals referred are more likely to excel, motivated not just by personal success but also by the expectations of the person who vouched for them. Click To Tweet

So how much is, do you feel the personality of the leader is important? To what degree is it important to building a great company?

I think it’s very important. So that client I was talking about before who would hire the three people, he was a very tough leader. And I think you can probably tell, by the way, he would hire the three people and kind of test them against each other. He was the type where he almost worked on a fear basis. So you were always fearful that you were going to upset him. So you didn’t want to upset him, so you would try to do your work really well. But motivating based on fear doesn’t have a long term, it doesn’t work in the long term.

I saw more people quit his team than any other client, and it was because they weren’t happy. And once they realized that they weren’t happy, and if they would get another opportunity somewhere else, they would leave. Whereas with my team, I try to be as fair as possible, as accompanying as possible. I am stern and I am from Jersey where we’re very fast paced, so deadlines are very important to me. But at the same time, I saw how being really like not understanding it and just not having, not being caring for your team can really decrease morale.

So we do a lot of fun things, like we do trivia nights. We just had a Hamilton trivia night last night. Next week we’re going to do from the show, The Office, an office trivia. We do things like that because even though we’re a remote team, it’s important to have that bond. So we do a lot of things like that. If a team member, you know, needs to take a day, no questions asked. OK. You know, as long as the work gets done on time, it’s OK. Just trying to be very accommodating and kind and understanding of the team.

It’s really fascinating. So you talked about your mentor, that you learned something from him, what to do, and you also learned something from him, what not to do.

Exactly.

So do the triaging with your hires, but not to treat them too harshly. That’s pretty cool that you’re kind of not idolizing him or her and just following everything, but just pick and choose, that’s powerful. That’s a powerful thing. So let’s switch gears here a little bit, and let’s get into the topic that you do and what I’m curious about. And this is SEO, search engine marketing. And we hear all these algorithms change all the time, and Google is getting smarter all the time. So first of all, how important still is SEO? And how do you generate great SEO if you’re an entrepreneur?

Yeah, SEO is critical. But the good news is so many things that we do on a daily basis can contribute to our SEO. So when you post on social media, it’s helping your SEO. If you have a podcast opportunity like this, it’s great for SEO. People can search my name, they can search your name, boom, they find us. So those are good for SEO. But it is, it’s really crucial. And what I usually do is I like to give the example that we all do. Let’s say you’re hungry, you want a pizza, what do you do?

You go to Google and you type in pizza or pizza near me, and you have maybe five pizzerias that come up. And then, you know, there were like thousands of pages showing pizzerias, but you pretty much just look at the first five that come up, because who has time to look through thousands of pizzerias? You just look at the first five. But what made those five pizzerias come up first when you type in pizza near me? It’s not because their pizza is necessarily the best, it’s because they have the best SEO.

So what we do for our clients is work to make sure that they are those top five pizzerias or the top five authors that come up when somebody searches for the keyword that, you know, that they want to reach. And there are a lot of ways to do that. The first step is definitely optimizing their website, making sure that we have… I like to put competitive keywords in, but keywords that aren’t so competitive that nobody’s searching for them, but keywords that are long-tail enough that there isn’t too much competition.

So, for example, we have a client who sells insurance. So they’re up against Farmers and Geico and all these huge companies where we see their commercials on TV every day. It’s very difficult to compete against them. So we came up with the idea of using a long tail keyword of contractor’s liability insurance. And now when you type in contractor’s liability insurance, his company lands on page one on top of GEICO actually, because GEICO isn’t thinking about a keyword like liability insurance, they’re just thinking of a word like insurance.

It’s definitely, there’s a lot of strategy involved when you’re thinking about the keywords that you’re going to use and then the placement. So you have to do on the website in the text, you have to do on the back end of the website, and then you have to do off-site SEO, which is where posting on other websites comes in or doing podcasts or being featured on a high domain authority website. And actually, the one thing to be careful of, though, when you’re posting on other websites is you need it to be high domain authority, meaning that every website is ranked one to 100. 100 means that they have great domain authority, zero means, oh my gosh, they’re spam.

So if you get ranked on a website with a lower domain authority than yours, it’s not gonna do anything for you. So for example, I have a website that has a domain authority of a 44, so every website that I get posted on, I wanna make sure it has over a 44, and that’s gonna help my website to get up to like a 50. Wow. Yeah. And then the other components of that are once you have your on-site SEO taken care of, then you want to maintain it. So that’s where posting blogs and social media regularly comes in, and that’s where posting regularly or having articles about yourself come out in other places or podcasts regularly is important.

SEO is crucial for online visibility. Optimize your website, use strategic keywords, and engage in off-site SEO activities to improve rankings. Click To Tweet

That’s fascinating. So you mentioned that podcasts can help your SEO, blogs, guest postings can help your SEO. What else can help your SEO?

Those are the main things. I mean, really, it’s a few different categories. So that’s why I like to categorize into our main areas where we do PR. So the PR is your podcast, your websites. And the higher domain authority of the website, the better. So, you know, we’ve got a lot of clients featured on Forbes. That’s amazing for their SEO. The social media. When you type in a company, one of the first things that comes up is Twitter. You want to update that regularly. You want to update your social media regularly. It just shows Google you’re active.

Google is looking for how active these companies are, because if they see that you haven’t posted regularly, or you haven’t posted a blog in your own website regularly, they go, oh, is this website defunct? You know, so once they see that it’s being posted on regularly, they know, oh, this is an active website, this is a popular website, this is a website that high domain authority websites trust, we should promote this to our searchers.

Yeah, someone told me recently that when you start a podcast, it’s really important that you are very consistent. And it’s actually, they told me that you have to do it for a year on a very consistent basis and that’s when Google starts to kick in. Is this really true that it takes a year?

No. A lot of people say, so that’s the same people who say, oh, you need to invest at least $5,000 in ads to see any revenue. No, I don’t, they give us a bad name. I think that within a year, yes, you’ll see the best results. Well, usually within three months you start to see the good results. And the way that I look at it is through ranking. So we had a client who is a doctor and he also is a preacher, and he wanted to rank number one in his area for when somebody searched for preachers with doctorates.

And within a month we got him onto page two. Within three months we got him onto page one. Within six months he was number one when somebody typed that in. So it doesn’t take a year. In fact, you should see your rankings move within the first month. But you can understand why somebody would say, oh yeah, we need a year, because then the pressure’s off of them. Then they could kind of take their time and keep charging their client month after month for that. Whereas with my company, we like to be very honest and be like, yeah, you’ll see some progress after a month. And the longer that we do this, the more progress you’re going to see, because that’s the other thing with SEO.

Once you stop, you’re not, obviously your rankings aren’t going to go down right away, but you should consistently update them to keep them there. So for example, when COVID happened, we had a client who has an events company. So obviously they stopped investing in their SEO because they couldn’t hold events, but their competition, realizing that other people are going to step SEO, started doing more SEO and they start outranking them. So we can’t account for other companies and what they’re going to do. It’s, you know, like it’s really about, so that’s why their position stops. Like you’re competing against other companies.

So, are you following also competitors to your clients and see what you need to do in order to beat the competitors?

Yeah, that’s why we have some great tools that we use that show us competitors, the keywords that they’re using, and how to outrank them in those keywords, but also looking at what people are actually searching for. So if a competitor is ranking in a keyword where there’s only like 50 searches a month, then it’s not worth it. But if they’re ranking in something where there’s like a thousand searches a month, and it’s a pretty easy keyword, then yes, we can definitely do that.

That’s fascinating. So what about social media? I mean, that’s another confusing subject, to me at least. Maybe other people nail it, but I just don’t know. You know, I hear that you have to be really social, so you actually, it’s basically networking online is what social media is, and if that’s true, then basically it’s not something you can out farm out because it has to be you personally. So it’s kind of pounding the pavement. So help me out, how does it work? And how can a firm like you help someone out to not have to be there and still have a good social media?

Yeah, so there are a lot of different components to social media. What we do for our clients is we write the posts. We research the hashtags to make sure it’s going to get in front of the right people. We post those on a schedule for when it will most likely be viewed by the audiences. And that does really well where then, you know, if somebody is searching for hashtag, you know, car insurance, let’s say we’re working with a car insurance company, and they find our client, they’re going to DM that client.

So in that way, you’re absolutely able to form that where we’re creating the graphics and all that. The part that’s more difficult to farm out, but that we still do is engagement and messaging. So if a client then takes that next step and DMs, do you have a company respond and answer the questions or do you respond yourself? That’s where a lot of clients, then they say, I’ll respond to the clients myself because I know the specifics. If they’re asking, if it’s like, we’ve actually worked with a car company and they sell cars, and they’re asking about the engines in the cars.

That might be something where the client could take that over, but we save them an abundance of time and get those people into their inbox through those posts and through ads. The other thing that you probably can’t format which is newer is something like Clubhouse, where that should be you actually talking and networking in Clubhouse or even TikTok where with TikTok we can edit the videos, we can put the hashtags, but it really should be the client talking in the videos to give the audience a better sense of who they are.

Okay, so you can basically farm out about 60% of it roughly?

I would say 90%. It’s about 90%. It really comes down to it. It’s almost like in the olden days, like if you hired a company to send out mailers, you know, they’re sending out the mailers, but then if somebody’s interested in those mailers, or they’re getting contact, they’re gonna contact you for the company. So this is a little bit like that, but even more so, we’re still, so this is as if you sent out those mailers, and then the person sending out the mailers was able to respond a little bit to the client. So let’s say the client says something like, man, I love these mailers, I love what you guys are doing, this is great. The company can totally say, Oh, you’re so welcome. Please check out our website if there’s any more questions. So it’s most of it. It’s just like the more technical aspects where the clients will step in and actually take a phone call or a final discovery call before booking the client.

How about this idea of documenting the journey? I hear people say, you have to document your journey, you have to be there and show that you’re here, you’re there, this is what you’re doing with your clients. Can you talk to this idea a little bit?

Yeah, that is important to show real-life success stories and case studies. That’s showing authenticity, so we do often ask for personal photos from clients that we can use in posts or professionally taken photos. It depends on their tone if they want to be completely professional or have a little bit of humor and fun in there. But yeah, yeah, we do. That’s something as well where you definitely should be personal. And that’s why places like Clubhouse and TikTok are doing so well, because they are so personal. You’re seeing the actual person talking, person behind the curtain. So, audiences are really liking that now.

So, what are the best channels for professional service firms? What would you recommend them use? Which kind of social media?

Yeah, it depends on the industry. I have seen for a lot of B2C companies, Facebook is still very good as long as you’re doing ads. Facebook ads are probably the most value, the most bang for your buck. I personally am running ads. We spent $50 this week and got 388 people who clicked on the link for $50. That’s an insane value. If I went to LinkedIn, I would have been charged at least $2,000 for that. So Facebook is very valuable when it comes to ads.

But if you’re gonna put out ads, you should have organic posts as well. So people know that you’re legitimate. Instagram is also very good. A lot of people are on Instagram. It’s very good to show your audience and you can also target them through hashtags, which is something you can’t do on Facebook. Twitter is also amazing because of the SEO benefits, not necessarily like everybody’s like, Oh, I don’t want to be on Twitter because there’s just political talk on there all day. And that’s true.

But if somebody is searching for your company, and the first thing that comes up is Twitter, which it almost always is. And they see these really great, well formed, well written tweets coming out, they’re going to be more prone to working with you. LinkedIn of course is a classic, but not for companies. Like company profiles don’t get shown to anybody. What I always recommend on LinkedIn is having your personal profile, have it connected to your company, but post from your personal profile or share your company profile because their algorithm definitely favors personal profiles over professional ones.

So always making that more personal. And more recently, Clubhouse and TikTok have really taken the world by storm. I haven’t fully gotten into TikTok yet. I mean, Clubhouse yet, I know a lot of people are doing a lot of seminars and things. That’s not one that is my specialty, but I do know a lot of people are loving that. TikTok though, I love TikTok. TikTok has amazing discoverability. I’ve gotten 4 million people watching my videos this month alone, whereas, you know, I’ve been on Instagram and YouTube since I was a kid, as long as they’ve been around, and I got maybe 10,000 views a year.

So to get 4 million in one month for not doing anything different, it just shows how their algorithm really shows you people, and I didn’t have to pay a dime for that. All I had to do was stand in front of my camera and talk about things that I enjoy. And it’s really neat, and it’s growing. So hopefully it stays like this, but it is growing, and people are seeing the value of TikTok more, so.

So, Gary Vee has this suggestion of, I think he calls it the two cents strategy.

Yeah.

That he basically communicates to, I don’t know, 90 people a day or something like that. I mean, is this sustainable? Is it, do people really do that?

Yeah, my team has done that. It’s an interesting idea. I like Gary V. He has a lot of really interesting ideas. I think what’s more important than that though, like you can do that, that’s great, but you need to make sure that you’re posting regularly on your own page. Because, you know, if you reach out to somebody and your page is blank or doesn’t look good, they’re not going to be interested in working with you.

So it’s important to make sure that your organic social media looks good and is being updated regularly before you go and start reaching out to potential leads. And we have done that, we have had people respond to it, but you have to make sure that it’s an organic connection because as soon as you go and you reach out to them and then you follow up with some kind of sales pitch, then they feel used, they feel like, oh, that wasn’t a genuine compliment then. So it has to be done in a way that feels genuine.

So let me ask you something that only came up in the last couple of days. I’m really curious about your take. So the company I’m working with is transforming into a franchise and they basically say that they do this because they want to have a unified brand. So all the licenses of the company, including myself, they want us to all migrate our website, basically close down our website, and then they’re gonna have this big central website and everyone will have a page there. What do you think? Is this a good thing for the licensees? Are we gonna get more interest through being part of a corporate page with a lot of money? Or is it better to have your own webpage and try to attack the market individually? What’s your thoughts on that?

So, with the main webpage, are they doing it where they can still contact? I’m trying to understand.

Yeah, they can contact you. So basically, they have one central webpage. Everyone has a microsite on it, which is uniform. So everyone has the same kind of microsite. They have these modules, but essentially it’s the same information on every microsite. It’s just different video and different picture. And they don’t, right now we have 700 websites. Everyone is doing their own marketing and they want to stop that, they want to do everything centrally and then you don’t, you basically farm down the marketing to them, and you hope that you’re gonna get more leads from them, from the central marketing, than you’re gonna get from your own marketing.

Well in theory, if their marketing works and they can do that, that would be amazing, and it makes sense from a standpoint, like it seems like everybody’s going to be saving funds because rather than paying for each individual domain, just having it all on one centralized tab, it’s going to definitely save funds, but it’s also going to give potential clients the ability to just have one website where they go to.

What are the pros? So what are the pros? So these are some of the pros, I guess, cost saving. Are there some cons to this?

The biggest con I would see is if the marketing efforts don’t work. Here you have a bunch of different marketing strategies, and when you have all those you have some that are bound to work and some that are bound not to work. Whereas if you’re doing this, where you have one marketing strategy that you’re using for everything, it’s a little scary because let’s say it works now, but things change, algorithms change. If things change too much, then you’re only using that one marketing strategy that’s a scary pickle to be in. But if they do it right, and they’re able to move with the changing times, then it’s a good thing.

That’s cool. So let’s switch gears here. I want to ask you this question. I read on your website that you have this concept of the 360 service. What does it mean?

Yeah, so it’s really four pillars. So we have PR, SEO, social media and ads. And they all go hand in hand. You know, when you have good social media, it helps your SEO. When you have good PR, it helps your SEO and your social media because you can post those PR opportunities on your social media. When you have good social media, it also will help your ads because people from your ads go to your social media and see your offerings. And then, yeah, I mentioned four of them. But yeah, so that’s really how it works. They all go hand in hand.

Okay. And what do you recommend? So the business owner, let’s say a business owner wants to really supercharge their marketing and PR and they outsource to you their social media, their SEO, their PR, what do they should not outsource to you? So is there a piece that they really need to keep in-house to create that collaboration, make it optimal?

Yeah, so I really wanted to be a one-stop shop for everybody. That’s why I started doing 360, because I see people, it’s such a pain for them when they have to find somebody to go do social media, and then they have to find another person to do PR. Like they’re running from place to place. So I wanted to be a centralized hub, but there are certain things that I still recommend they do themselves. You know, the one is with TikTok, for example, I do TikTok consulting, but I don’t film people’s TikToks for them.

That’s something that should be personal because those are the kinds of TikToks that sell. Like people like seeing people on there. Certain things like that, like with PR, for example, we’ve had clients who have said, hey, can you do the interviews for me? No, we can’t. They want to hear you. They want to see a face of the company. So and photos, same thing with photos. We run somebody social media, one of the first things that we ask for is any images, any photos that they share with us logos.

Those are things that we can’t fake, you know, we can make really good graphics, but we need some personal photos as a basis for that people respond to people. So anything personal like that, those are things that you should not outsource. Also, you know, with that final like closing with the client, depending on your business, like we work with the supplement company where we sell hundreds of supplements for them every week and they don’t have to talk to anybody. But other companies where it’s more high ticket, you know, we work with attorneys and insurance companies, those are things where we can’t close them, they have to do that part.

Okay, that’s cool. Okay, so it’s good. It’s a good feeling that I can also 90% and then you give me the coaching or whoever, you give your clients the coaching what they need to do to add this additional 10% to make this a powerful combination, right?

Exactly.

So, in closing, I’d like to ask you, what is your vision for Dr. Rizzy? Where do you want to take this company?

Yeah, I want to keep growing it. You know, something that started out as something I did as a freelancer, as a student, I always dreamed that it would come to this point where I could have a team and build it up and scale it. But now I really just want to continue on that. I want to continue scaling it. I also, I actually just made a TikTok about this yesterday. Something that I’ve realized where I used to always, oh my gosh, if somebody wants to work with me, I was thrilled to work with them. And I still am, but I’ve learned there are certain clients that it’s just we can’t work with.

And one of the most obvious ones, we have students come to us asking us to like write assignments for them because we do writing. And we say, no, we won’t do your writing for you. You know, even grad students, they’ll ask us to write the thesis or something. No, we can’t do that. And, you know, I’ve had a company that sells an energy drink and they asked us to do the marketing and they were claiming all these things, oh, we’ll improve your cholesterol, we’ll prevent heart attacks. And we said, well, where’s the scientific data proving that? And they said, oh, we don’t have any of that. So we said, we’re sorry, we can’t work with you.

You know, if you’re going to be giving this harmful advice, we can’t do it. So something that we’ve done is become a little bit more selective of the people that we work with. We want to make sure that it’s ethical. We want to make sure that we can actually work with them. And that’s, you know, just, that’s something that I’m proud of and something that I would like to continue to do. That’s almost a luxury, right? To be able to say to clients, I’m sorry, I can’t help you with this. So I’m happy that we can do that. I would like to continue scaling while being selective and only helping the clients that are ethical and that we know we can help.

Yeah, I love that. I love that philosophy. And actually, yes, I mean, it might look like a luxury, but actually it is not because it improves your karma. So then you know, and then your team knows that you’re really standing for something authentic and something positive, that’s gonna be an energy that’s gonna project out from the company and your prospects are gonna feel it. And maybe that’s why I wanted to work with you guys as well. So you never know, you never know whether it’s a luxury or a necessity, actually.

That’s a good one.

So that’s awesome. So, Morissa, if someone would like to learn more and connect with you, check out your social media. Where should they go to?

Yeah, so we have drrissyswriting.com. I also am on social media everywhere. I have accounts for Dr. Rissy, so you can find Dr. Rissy’s writing and marketing as a handle, or my name, Morissa Schwartz, pretty much everywhere. And I’m the only person with the name Morissa Schwartz, so you find me right away.

That’s fantastic. Okay, well, listeners, do check her out. It’s worth it. Morissa does really good stuff, and I’m gonna continue checking her out in at least the next six months, then she will be helping me launch my book that I’ll tell you about a little bit later. So Morissa, thanks for coming on the show. I really enjoyed it. And our listeners, please stay tuned. There’s going to be another recording next week.

 

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