I can say with confidence — I’m not the only one who have told you that content is important. In the marketing world you heard about it and how business owners, agencies and marketers talk about this…
Does it sound like a big deal?
It also seems to be enormous and time consuming.
In other words, there are only so many platforms that require consistent content:
- Blogs
- YouTube
- Snapchat
And there are many types of content each on these platforms:
- Text
- Video
- Photo
- Audio
If you feel like slowly withdrawing from this article and pretend that you never read, then you don’t need to start such a massive commitment to content — we understand it. But just don’t stray too far, because I’m going to show you how to turn this cold audience into engaging ones.
The creation of different pieces of content for all these different platforms may not be a problem for a huge company with a giant team of people dedicated solely to content creation. But what about those that can’t afford to put that in place.
At the end of this post, you should have a template that you can use to effectively produce reliable and high-quality content.
Is there a way to keep pumping out more contents — good content, mind you — without wasting every waking hour sitting on the keyboard, staring at your pc, or standing in front of the camera?
This is how it works.
- Creativity: Regularly come up with ideas and subjects of good content that resonate with your audience.
- Development: When you have a list of topics, you turn those ideas into great pieces of valuable content.
- Breaking: This is my favourite aspect of the process. It’s the process of taking one great piece of content and transforming it into several different assets that you can leverage on through all your different marketing channels.
Let’s get deeper into each of these steps so that you can start pushing out some good content.
#1: Creativity
The first step in content development is to determine which subjects you are going to cover.
And how are you going to work this out?
A lot of people are going to get frustrated at this point, because they don’t know where to start.
But it’s pretty easy to follow this three step.
- Research What People Are Talk About In Your Industry:
Need to learn the secret of coming up with great content ideas quickly and easily? Begin with the questions that your customers are already asking.
And as long as you know where to look, the rest will be pretty easy to do. Cue the social website to find great content ideas for your business:
- Quora
- Facebook Group
- Ask Your Customers
These are great places to find out about the questions people are asking in your industry. And there’s one more resource that we are suggesting to use in combination with those sources and that’s a Keyword Planner.
Using a keyword analysis tool (like Keywords Everywhere or SEMrush) you will find the search volume for various questions. When you search Google, the Chrome browser extension Keywords Everywhere will reveal approximately how many searches are made per month for your search keyword.
So once you get a list of the relevant content topics from the above sources, it’s a good idea to do some keyword research to find out which questions are most frequently asked? This way, you can prioritize your content development to continue with the highest-volume questions first.
- Break Each Issue Into Different Topics:
Okay, so at this point, you’ve got a list of questions, things your customers want to ask or already asking. But one thing you will note at this point is that any question in your list will lead to multiple content topics.
The next thing to do, though, is to take the list of questions and break them down into as many different content ideas as possible. Then, you can move on when you are done with that.
- Transform Each Topic Into A Headline
Now that you have got a list of unique content topics, the last thing you need to do is take these ideas and turn them into headlines. The headline will be the title of your post, what people will see as it appears on Facebook or in Google’s search results.
Some people may be wondering:
Why do i have to write the headline first?
Can’t i write the content first, and then give it a headline later?
Yeah, theoretically, you should do that. But first, I suggest writing the article, and doing it yourself, for a couple of reasons:
- A good headline is going to give your content a “hook,” something that makes it interesting. Knowing your up-front hook will help you build stronger, more engaging content.
- The headline is the most important part of your article, so it is worth taking the time to make it a good one.
- If you are outsourcing the content writing process to a ghost-writer, having a good headline for them can help make sure they know exactly what kind of article you want them to write.
Keep in mind that while you are going through this process, it’s important to have your headlines talk to the desired end result. Think of what the reader needs to know. That’s exactly should be what you want to talk about in your headlines.
So whatever you are doing here, don’t talk about yourself. Instead, try to think about each topic from the point of view of your ideal prospects:
How do they feel about it?
What kind of issues do they have?
What do they want to know about?
#2: Development
Have a list of great ideas for new content pieces at this stage. Now let’s turn these ideas into some actual pieces of content.
The method we adopt, and which we recommend to others, is to start with a Social Media Content Manager. Then turn the social media content into a blog post. If you follow this method, you will be able to quickly and easily break these 2 content parts into all kinds of content assets in stage three.
Firstly, let’s make a social media content and then turn the content into a blog post.
How to Create a Social Media Content
Already, some people may be frightened by this idea.
Social media content doesn’t have to be difficult at all.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t have to be some elaborately crafted content with special effects, and animations. What you really need is a computer with graphic design tools like Photoshop and Canva on both pc and mobile.
If you have the above tools, all you have to do is build a slide deck on your topic. And then sit down in front of your pc, start developing text or graphical content and chat about the topic while you are going through the stack.
(We have noticed that 10 minutes is a perfect spot to create contents of this kind).
You are a marketer, after all.
In your profession, you are well-versed, and I’m willing to bet that you are perfectly capable of sitting down and thinking about things that are important to your business.
Trust me; this is better than it looks. Just give it a try.
Note, if you stumble along the way, you can still start over or correct your mistakes.
How to Create Your Blog Post
Now that your content is ready, it’s easy to turn it into a blog post. You can either write the post or outsource it to a qualified web content writer. You can use sites like Upwork or Fiverr.
Just send your content headline and brief to a ghost-writer to make it into a post. There are all sorts of choices for you, so you are sure to be able to find a good writer that suits your budget.
If you follow this method, you will have 2 pieces of high quality content: a social media post and a blog post.
#3: Breaking
If you are not familiar with the word splintering, it’s essentially the process of taking bits and pieces off your existing content and distributing them across your social networks.
In other words, it’s where you turn one piece of content into a lot of contents. And this is what we are going to do with both your social content and your blog post.
How to Break Your Social Media Content
Here’s what you will do to the social media content we talked about earlier:
Break the content into a blog post. (You have already done this in the last step)
Using the content as a piece of content — I recommend using it on a gated squeeze page or landing page to gather leads.
Split the content into tempting social media images or videos.
And in the meantime, you can post bits and pieces of the images and videos to Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Using Social Media Content Manager
It’s a good idea to sit and take a look at what you’ve achieved.
You sat down and produced one piece of content — a social media post where you just talked about a topic you are already familiar with.
From there, you outsourced a blog post and then split each of those assets into a few smaller pieces of shareable content.
Perhaps you ended up with three splitted content and 5 social media photos in addition to the blog and or a video itself. Resulting in 10 pieces of material for you to publish and post.
You are almost there, but you are not quite done yet.
The next thing you want to do is schedule these content pieces on a marketing calendar using a social media tool like Hootsuite, ZohoSocial, Buffer, etc.
Basically, you determine ahead of time when you are going to share every individual asset.
This way, you can spread how much you post content related to this a topic. Here is what your calendar could look like:
The coolest thing is that all these social media posts came from a single piece of content that only took you about 15 minutes to create.
It’s a very effective Social Media Manager that you can utilize to produce maximum amount of high-quality content in a minimum amount of time.
Also if you don’t have a huge team, it can help you to always be at the top of your content game. Using the Social Media Content Manager to generate never-ending content that creates visibility and converts viewers to subscribers.