PODCAST EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

High Leverage Content Creation

Continuing on the theme of the last episode, this one contains several actionable tactics about high leverage content creation… How to work less and produce more when it comes to making content for your blog and social media channels.

Episode #63 | Episode Date: March 14, 2015


Continuing on the theme of the last episode, this one contains several actionable tactics about high leverage content creation… How to work less and produce more when it comes to making content for your blog and social media channels.

Hello! We are now on Episode #63 of Coffee Break Blogging and today we are going to continue talking about High Leverage Content Creation and how to make more content by putting in less effort to do it. This is highly important for those of us who were a little lacking for time; whether it is because we’ve got our families, whether we’ve got a day job, whatever it might be; we need to be able to create good content and do it without giving our entire lives to it. So that is what we are going to be talking about here.

The Idea Of Outsourcing

One thing that we did touch on in the last episode when we started talking about this topic, was the idea of outsourcing things. I talked about going to Fiverr and have somebody transcribe something. I did mention very briefly that I have a VA who helps me do some of this stuff. The VAs are very good and you definitely should consider getting a Virtual Assistant. Even if you don’t think that you are ready for it, there are ways to go. There are companies where you can use them on just hourly basis. You can hire them full time, obviously. You can also hire them part time. And it does not cost very much if you are going to be utilizing them at any kind of regularity; it would definitely worth it to do that.

But outsourcing in general is a very important component of leverage and getting leverage with your content creation. It is something that you definitely want to consider doing. And I want to say “consider”… Don’t just be like “No…” You want to be thinking of this not just in terms of expense. You need to be thinking in terms of growing your business. And if you are going to grow your business you cannot do it just on the back of your own time where you are basically you are your slave, so to speak.

You need to be looking for points of leverage. And there are people out there whose entire job is to do some of the things that you need to be doing but yet those things are not going to grow your operation. You need to be focused on those things which are going to grow your operation. Now, creating content is a very important thing and it needs to be in your own voice and consistent with your brand.

So the chances are, unless you got a large team, that you are probably the person who has to do that. But it doesn’t mean that all the back end stuff now has to be done by you, too. You are responsible for the ideas and recording the ideas into something that can be consumed. But other people could very easily do all the mechanics of that for you. And I think hiring a VA to do it is ideal.

If you want to hire specifically a VA, then there are people that you can hire on Fiverr, on oDesk and what have you ,to get these things done. Put the time to find these people, get them available, try a few hours and see what works for you.

But with all that said and done…

What are you going to have them do?

So let’s talk about that… some specific tactics that you can use to get more leverage from your time when it comes to content creation.

  • One Video Into Different Formats

I’ve done this many times. And then what you do with the video is you rip the audio out of it. You literally export just the audio portion of it and you turn that audio from the video into a podcast. So, so far we have got two different things. We’ve got a video and we’ve got an audio podcast. Now, you have somebody transcribe the audio and you now have a written component. So what do we have now? We have got 3 different things from one piece of content. We have got a video, we’ve got a podcast and we have a written piece of content.

Now depending on the length of that transcript, you can turn it in to a full-on report, you could turn it fully into a blog post or you can take just a section of it and turn it into a blog post… there are lots of things that you can do. But here is what we have done; we already have created 3 different formats: Video, audio and written. But yet you as the owner, you only had to sit down and do one of them. And not only that, on the video you can have somebody else do the editing for you so you do not have to do that… You can literally point your phone on your face, talk about something, upload it and have somebody else take over from there and do the rest. 😉

There are lots of things that you can do there and this is a very high leverage content creation when you can create one thing and output three or more.

Another thing that you can do; and in fact I’m doing it right this minute, and that is I record myself actually doing my podcast. Now I am actually doing this podcast right now. I am sitting here at my desk, talking into my mic, Garage Band is doing the recording but I am also simultaneously recording a video.

And if you are on YouTube right now watching me, you are watching the video part of it. So literally, the videos are nothing more than recording of me recording my podcast. So what I actually do is I use ScreenFlow on my Mac, I start the recording on ScreenFlow and then after that and I start the recording on Garage Band.

So as I sit right now, I have both Garage Band and ScreenFlow simultaneously recording. One is doing the video, one is doing the audio. And then I have a little tiny bit of post-production that I do when I am done, they go up to Dropbox and then, well… guess what… My VA takes over. I have got a very nice system written for her where she processes all these stuff, gets it out, gets it on iTunes, gets it on my blog… That’s it! That is high leverage content creation.

  • Re-purposing Past Content

Another idea that you could do is to re-purpose pieces of your past blog posts into things that you can then share on social media. Now where this idea came from is the observation on Facebook and Google+ and stuff like, that is that many times it is the more in-depth posts that do really well. People want me. They want some real content. So if you have a Facebook page for your business, for your blog; if all you do is link drop on there, they are not going to pay as much attention and your engagement is going to be really low. And I know, because quite frankly I have done a lot of that on my page. My page on Facebook is not a very high priority to me because I do not think it is all important of an asset to be honest with you. But I do use it. And I am noticing even with my own stuff that if I just link drop my latest blog post I get just a tiny little bit of engagement; not much at all. If I post something that has got some “me” to it like almost it is like a blog post in and out of itself, but it is actually a post on my Facebook page, I get more. Or even sometimes people re-share it.

Now, you might think “Well, crap… that means I have to create all these little things just for social?” No… Go back into your blog post, find good passages of stuff that you have already written and re-share those as boards out on social media. Another thing that you can do is take quotes from your own blog post and put them into image form and then you could share out those quotable images out on Facebook, on Pinterest, on Flicker… any place where an image would work… and that is many places and you are leveraging stuff that you have already done.

Now, think about this all the way up to food chain. Let’s say that all of these started all because you had put your phone on your face and talked for about 5 minutes and recorded a video and uploaded it… And then the system and somebody else like a VA or an outsourcer took over from there. All of these things including quotable images, various things that you can share on social media; all of it was the result of 5 minutes of work with a phone on your face. How awesome is that, right?

  • Get It On With Your Phone

Here’s another thing that you can do: If you want to create a report or a white paper or something like that; something that has a little higher perceived value but then again, the writing of it takes a while; you could speak the whole thing out using your phone. I actually have an iPhone here; I’m looking at my phone right now. I think it is called “Dictamus” it was not a free app. I think it is called Dictamus; it’s a Dictaphone on your iPhone. And you can record whatever you want and then with one button you can export it in all kinds of different places. You can put on Dropbox; do whatever the hell you want with it, but you can use something like that.

Turn your phone into a Dictaphone and it will allow you to actually write reports using your phone. And again, you could do this while you are driving or whatever. But of course if you want to put a little more thought into it make sure you get it right; maybe not be distracted by traffic, you could do it while you are at your desk, but it is going to go so much faster when you speak it than if you were to actually sit down and write it.

  • Q & A Webinar

Another thing that you could do; and I have done this two or three times and that is I do a Q & A Webinar. So I’ll go to my list and I will announce a Q & A Webinar. Literally the entire purpose of the webinar is to do nothing but Q & A. And they can come on and they can attend that thing in real time if you want. But then what you do is you record the entire webinar. Now as you go through it you have each question shown on the screen; on your slide. And then after that you go and you answer it. And then the next question, you show the question and you go and you answer it. So let’s say if you take 15 or 20 questions on this Q & A Webinar and you simply groove through them on the webinar and you answer them, then you are going to have a recording. It is going to be a long recording; it is going to have answers 15 or 20 questions, however many you decide to take.

Now here is what you can do; you can take that recording and you can split it up into one question per video. And now what are you going to do from there, is that you are going to now have 15 or 20 different videos all with a question that your prospects or your audience asked. You could put those things on all the video sites. Every single one of those things… on YouTube, on MetaCafe, on Daily Motion, on Vimeo; whatever floats your boat. Post it up on your Facebook page.

That is a lot of content right there from one webinar, a little bit of prep time beforehand, you had just created 10 to 15 to 20 different videos. Now each one of those is multiplied out by how many different places on the internet that you post them all, you could literally have 100 to 150 different pieces of real estate out there on the internet done for you, all fairly keyword optimized; they are questions that your prospects asked because they actually asked it, all from doing a one hour webinar. And that is another very good example of high leverage content.

  • Kindle

Another thing when it comes to creating reports or even if you want to write a book. You could take content that you already have written on your blog and re-purpose it into a report or even your book. Let’s say you want to get a Kindle book out there, just to have a presence on Amazon.com; well you do not have to rewrite everything and write that thing from scratch. You can take stuff that you have already written, re-purpose it and put it out there in Kindle format. Again, high leverage…

Now does that mean that you just literally is going to be a copy and paste job? Probably not. You probably are going to make some modifications, make sure that it flows well. But if you could save yourself 50% of the labor by using stuff that you have already made, wouldn’t that be effective, wouldn’t that be of high leverage? You are damn right it would!

  • Curation

Last one I want to mention; and this is one where you do not even have to actually make the original content, and that is using curation. It is called the Curation Model where your value proposition to the marketplace at that point is to gather other people’s content together, digest it into a way where it is highly presentable and highly useful to your readers or your prospects.

So what you can do, if you can compile a massive resource of tips or techniques all set it around one particular thing that your audience really want. So I know from my traffic, from my stats that the idea of blog promotion or blog monetization are two very hot topics with my market. So if I would create a massive resource post, send it around those ideas of well like, “101 ways to promote your blog” that would be really powerful. But the thing is I do not have to necessarily come up with all 101 ways.

I can put myself into the role of researcher, go out on other people’s site, find those 101 things and curate them into a blog post where every single one of those 101 things was something that I found on somebody else’s site. Now the whole key here is you are going to link out to all of these other places. You are going to link to them. You are not taking their stuff. You are going to take their idea. You are going to put your own quick analysis of it and you are going to link to the original source.

And so you are going to have a massive resource here, which is going to be highly useful to your prospects but then you also have all these people you linked to. So guess what you can do from there? You can actually email all 101 of those people that you linked to, tell them “Hey I linked to this thing, I really like what you are doing, blah-blah-blah, you might find this useful or maybe you want to share this with your people” some of them are going to do it and you just built yourself some back links to your curated post. Again, high leverage.

Now there are a couple of things I want to end off this episode with…

Mindset

I want you to have this as a mindset and I want this to be something that is in your mind often… The idea of leverage. Finding points of leverage. Look for ways that you can get more results than the effort that you put into it. Every idea that I have given you here on this episode is all ways of creating content with less effort and getting a lot more output from it. So that is a very important mindset not just with content creation but with other things as you grow your business is looking for points of leverage.

Don’t Shoot For Perfection

The other thing; and this is important when it comes to doing all these, is that I do not want you to shoot for perfection. I don’t want you to think that you have to have perfectly formatted content in order to release it.

For example, I talked earlier about the idea of simply putting a phone on your face and talking… Well, that kind of video is going to look exactly like a video that was recorded on a phone. Now, if you think that your video has to look like it was produced in Hollywood in order to release it; you might shoot yourself on the foot and not do it because you think it is not good enough. I don’t want you to go there. It is better to put content out than to put out none at all. So don’t shoot for perfection. You’ll get better at it over time and as your systems perfect you are going to find different ways of still creating higher quality things but still reduce the amount of time that it takes to do it.

So there are ways… for example with phone, iMovie on your iPhone if you have an iPhone. It is a great little movie editors. You can at least put an intro or an outro reel on the end of the video and on the beginning of the video and do it all on your phone before you export it. So little things… you could set up a tripod that is capable of holding your phone and have it permanently set up in your office or your home office and then you do not have the shaky thing going own when you are trying to record a video. It can be steady. Just little system things that you can do to make the production value a little bit better, but still think about speed and leverage.

So, hopefully that was very valuable for you. I highly encourage you to implement as much of this as you can. It will take a little bit of ramp up time; this is not an instantaneous type of stuff, but do it because you will get much larger results from your blogging if you do. Okay?

Thanks for being here! I will see you next time. 😉