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Amber: Creating Killer Content

content really is kind of the backbone of really great social presence. And today, content marketing is really the backbone of a lot of business, and it really is kind of the next wave of how the world is going to go, and you might wonder why that matters. So why should I care about creating all of this stuff? Because creating content is incredibly time consuming. It also requires a lot of effort, coordination, getting all those things out to different places. But the first thing that matters and we've talked about related points a few times today is developing authority now authorities a little bit different than expertise because expertise or the skills and the knowledge that you have naturally, those are the things you know. Authority is the sense of getting other people to believe that you are a source that they can rely on. So becoming a trusted resource for people online is really the magic. That's what you wanna become in your business is a destination for people to go to where ...

they not only are entertained by your stuff and they think you're really cool and they see your personality and they believe in your vision. But they also believe that you're somebody that they can trust to give them really good information and that you are a leader in your industries. And when toe listen to rely on depend on authority is kind of the magic fairy dust. And I plugged the copy blogger folks a bunch of times today. But I'm gonna do it one more time because this is really the essence of authority is something they talk about a lot. So if you want to read more about why this is important, if you go to copy blogger dot com, there's tons of great, um content on their site about why and how to create authority. And I love the word because and sometimes authority can have a negative connotation, like, you know, we're being authoritative. But really, what we're doing is having a strength of position that shows people that we know what we're talking about and that we can help them get better at what they dio. The second piece of creating really important content is very important. It's not sexy. It's something that happens on the Web all the time. It's actually something I'm not any good at, but it's S E O. And I'm not a search engine person. I'm not a great search engine optimization person. But what I will tell you is that even if you're not a great search engine optimization person, the way to get better at it is not to just jam your stuff full of a bunch of keywords and hoped that the search engines hit it. Google is constantly changing their algorithms and the way that they develop what they call authority and pay drink and things like that online that determine what sites are shown well and high in search rankings. Content is a really key driver to that, but it's not again. It's not about creating a bunch of keywords and such. It's actually about creating really useful content that makes people come to your site, link to your site, show up at your site and share what you produce so that ah, whole ecosystem effects search engine rankings highly and you know Google will never sell all of their secret sauce and tell us all how they do it. But if you want to keep up to date on all of that, what I can tell you is that consistently, if you're overwhelmed by the search engine world, right. Great content, right? Great content about the topics that you want to be known for and the search engines will find their way to you. I promise that they will. But it's important. And in small business, especially or independent business, search engine is still really important because because people do look and search for businesses online and this is how we find us. Have you guys caught a scene yet? Okay. Having a unique voice in your content matters in a huge, huge way. There are certain pieces that I can pick up. My co author, Jaber, I know when I'm reading something by J. I know when I'm reading something by, um, Murray for Leo. I know what I'm reading. Something that is by somebody who has a strong president voice, and what you want is people to pick it up and go. Oh, that's something Kelly wrote, because if you want that kind of recognition and you wanna have a unique perspective that people can appreciate, there's books out there. E books on writing, great content. But if mine is a little irreverent has some humor. It might be more fun for somebody to read, so it's okay to have that unique voice developing great content also helps you establish that great voice. Because if you don't have it yet, we were talking about this a little earlier. Eric, what if I don't know what I'm writing about? What if I'm not sure what my voice or my perspective should be? The active, developing great content will help you refine that voice so you find your voice through writing through producing content. It doesn't just fall out. Usually at the beginning, it's gonna be a lot of it. Aeration and testing so content will help you both create and perpetuate a unique voice. I want to talk about all the nuts and bolts of a really good content ecosystem. These are the things that you need to make sure that you have in order to get ah, great working system of content that will constantly refresh itself in something you can manage and something that you can pay attention to day in and day out. The 1st 1 we talked a little bit about this earlier is inputs, So doing that listening stuff actually, is your goldmine for creating really great content because listening for those points of need or understanding what conversations are taking place out in your industry, that's those are the sparks of ideas because you can actually say I could create a post around that I could do a video or we should do a Pinterest board about all of those great things. So the inputs that you get by listening to the Social Web are all of the great inspiration you can use to put stuff back out onto the Social Web and, of course, your natural expertise. So if videography is something that you know how to do, or if health and wellness is something that you're an expert at, or if it's photography or anything like that, your expertise is kind of the the unsexy. But the most critical part of all of the content. I know social. I no business. I know consulting. I know a little bit about writing a lot about dogs and a lot about wine. Not the good stuff, just how to drink it. Oh, now I'm kidding, but the point is that you want to have something that you can help teach other people. And one of the great things I think about social content communities is that I'm constantly learning something. And no matter how much I think I've crammed my brain full of information, there's already there's always somebody out there sharing something new interesting that I didn't know before. And I love things like creative life because there's just this wealth of information and somebody could do what to them is the most basic Photoshopped tutorial. I'm going, Oh God, I was totally boggled by that. So I finally learning how to do that, I can't do anything in photo shop it all. So those kinds of expertise that you think is second nature to you is actually something that's fascinating to somebody else. So don't think that you have to have super sophisticated expertise, all the things that to you are the A B. C's of what you do and how you do it are the breeding ground for really great content. You might not think it's really exciting, but I promise you somebody else is gonna look at it and go. That was so enlightening because I didn't know how to do that before so don't be afraid to showcase expertise that you don't think it's particularly new or different. But it is something that can can still be valuable to somebody else. You've got to have a community because content doesn't go anywhere without one. Now I could say that content you could get, that you could build an audience. You get a bunch of people out there and you could push out your content and then it falls off a cliff. What community helps content do is stay alive. So what happens? Interestingly, online is that content will resurface. Something that you wrote or created months ago will go out into the ether, and you'll never see it again until six months later, when somebody re shares it on Facebook. You're like, Whoa, where did that come from? But your community is that engine. It's the thing that makes that happen, and communities are all connected to each other. So a lot of times when we see community drawn as a graphic, we usually see like a bunch of little people, and they're all connected by like single lines. You know exactly the graphic I'm talking about, right? The truth is that true communities are messy. There really, really messy. And they're really intertwined because I as a unique human being and connected toe lots of different places on the Web and my interests intersect all over the place. So my communities air not neat and tidy, which means that if I'm getting great content from my social media community, but I'm over here in my animal rescue community and they need to learn something about social media. I share resources from over here over there, and now they're sharing it amongst them. So community is really it's It's the engine in the mechanics behind really great content. And that's why it's were important to develop a community than Justin audience, because you don't want to just push it out once and have it stop. You want that to live on? We'll talk a little bit more in a minute about how to do that. When I talk about content assets, what I mean is all of the pieces of content that air written, published, produced or otherwise created by you, so assets can be blocked. Posts, e books, videos, pictures, anything that you created uniquely and all those things have value to your business. Basically, what you're doing is creating a media library of all the things that you do build, create, and they're all sort of in a big virtual file cabinet that you want to draw from. So it's important to value those things in and of themselves. Because what we'll talk about in a minute is that you actually can reuse, repurpose and send all that stuff around so that you're not having to reinvent the wheel every time Network is different. That community, here's what I'll explain. Community is that idea. Like I said, all the chairs facing each other, we're all chatting. We're all hanging out in the rooftop. Having a beer network is all of the people I'm connected to. So network is not just the people I know and interact with, but it's also the potential of the people I could know and interact with based on the connections I have. The best way to visualize that is something like Lincoln. I don't feel use Lincoln on Guy actually think Lincoln is doing so incredibly exciting things right now with their content, but they're sort of like the visualization of a network, because I'm connected Teoh Dave. But Davis connected to these other nine people that I don't know. But Dave no. So Dave's my conduit to those people. Having a strong network means that you have people who already trust what you dio, and they're willing to make recommendations. Discussions mentioned you in conversation. You guys were going to remember the people I talked about today in all of my different talks that those people are part of my network. They didn't ask me to come up here and talk about them today, but I use them as great examples because they're connected to me. I trust them, I know them, and I know that there's someone that is worth me standing up here and was staking my reputation. I'm that I'm telling you they're any good. So having a really strong network is something really important to invest in its different than just cultivating community. Having a strong network means actually being out and making professional connections that can be mutually beneficial, so it could be just a purely professional relationship. But the offline network is really important for online success, and I think that's something we tend to forget when we do a lot of social stuff because we think online, online, online, online. But this is where stuff still happens. I still make business deals over dinner tables. I'm sure people still do it on golf courses. So human networks of people where we're actually talking to people offline are a huge driver for great content. The people who are gonna read your stuff, visit your blog's you're gonna meet people out and about in human space three dimensional, this space that are actually going to be great drivers for your content world. So don't neglect the network that you build both online and off to be an important part of your entire content ecosystem. Please don't be afraid to test things, and by that I mean it doesn't I forgot who it was that was saying. I feel like my site has to be perfect. The Social Web is the most powerful real time feedback mechanism ever, for better and worse. You know, it could be scary sometimes, but the beauty of content and building a great system is your willingness to create something. Put it out there, listen to what people say. Bring it back, make it better and put it out again. So the way great content becomes great content is because it's built off of time and energy and redoing it and redoing it in redoing until it's amazing. So the people who write compelling blog's or who great do great podcasts or do amazing video didn't start out doing that way. They learned by creating the content, being brave enough to push it out there and then listening to what people have to say. So that feedback mechanism is something really important for you to invest in and actually be willing to stick stuff out there and say, I want you to tell me what you think about this, which makes a lot of us really nervous. But treat your business and your content like a laboratory. Get in there and test things guests and say, You know, my hypothesis is that if we wrote a post Siri's about, um, 20 raise to groom your dog, I think that would go crazy. But we should test that against an e book and see how those do I mean experiments. There's nothing you're going to do in the content world. Save maligning somebody personally. That isn't flexible, so you can go out there and change things. Redo things, stop doing things. But it's a malleable form, and it's really important to get it out there and tweak. It is you go because you can. It's not permanent. You didn't spend millions of dollars toe, print a book or do anything like that. It's it's Web content. You can edit it, change it, rework it, mash it all together. That's the cool thing about the Web. So how do I pick what media to use for my content? I'm not going to be able to give you that answer. We've talked several times about how I'm not going to give you the magic bullet of which tool to use when, But I will tell you the things you need to consider when you're thinking about Should I be on Pinterest or should I be doing video? The first is time. How much time do you have? I average sitting down and writing a block post is relatively labour intensive. It could take anywhere from 1/2 an hour into a couple of hours to, depending on how much research and stuff you put into it, producing a video could take significantly longer repainting a bunch of stuff on Pinterest. Maybe not as long, so a very real consideration for your content system needs to be how much time you have to devote to it on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. And you got to be realistic about that. You got other demands on your time and other things you're trying to accomplish in your business. It's not all about social media and content. So decide how much time you have each week to spend on all this stuff and start choosing your media according to that. The other thing, of course, is, is your audience there? So in my business to business consulting world, the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies don't usually hang out on Pinterest as far as I know. So it's not the kind of place that I'm gonna spend a lot of time and money investing in content on Pinterest. However, if you are a wedding photographer, I would think that's probably an amazing place to be. So it all depends on where the people that are gonna buy your products and services are hanging out, and figuring that out is leveraging all the listening tools we talked about before. You'll see where those conversations are taking place, and that should help drive which media you choose. Next, of course, is function the sounds simple, and it is simple, but it's missed a lot of times. Will the media that you're choosing do what you want it to dio. There's so many tools at our disposal and folks will get all up in arms with me that Twitter Twitter doesn't work Twitter's heart. I can't sell on Twitter well, Twitter's 140 characters and if you have a major long value proposition to give to somebody, Twitter's probably not going to do what you need it to dio. So it's really important to pick tools that match the function of what you're trying to get them to do. If it's a visual, you want a visual platform. If it's text based, do you want something text based and I feel kind of dumb. Bringing this up is a point because it's so simple. But people grapple with tools all the time, thinking I have to make Google plus work for me. If it's not the right media, it's not the right media so make sure that you've got the combination of form and function going on so that it does what you needed to dio. The last point here is comfort. This is my moment of reassurance for all of you. Sort of like I talked about. You don't always have to blogged. You don't always have to be on the social networks that you don't like. You know, I don't I don't understand. This whole thing of you know you have to be on Facebook. If you hate Facebook, you probably aren't gonna have any fun doing it. And I guarantee you, if you don't enjoy building the content, if you don't enjoy participating in the community, you are not going to be good at either one of those things. So if you don't love blogging, you shouldn't be blogging. If you don't love video, you shouldn't be video. So it's really important to actually have a level of comfort with the tools that you're using because something you're comfortable with, chances are you're gonna use it on a more regular, consistent basis, right? So I love the idea of saying I'm gonna pick the things I like to dio and Hopefully, there's enough of my audience present that I can actually build something. I enjoy a couple of things about what content is really good. At first and foremost, we've talked a few times today. That content is really good at informing people. So if you just have news to share, if you have information to get out to the world, if you have announcements to make. If you're launching a business, content is a really great vehicle to tell people things until let them know what's going on. And that's what we would consider more traditional type marketing. So it's really good to inform people about what's happening in your business in your world. I think one of the more powerful thing is about content is being able to educate and teach people something that they didn't know before. Now that doesn't mean necessarily that you need to be teaching them what you dio. It doesn't mean you need to be teaching them how you do what you dio. It could be teaching them something related to what you dio. So I'm gonna use you guys as an example because you're in the wedding videography business. Maybe you're not gonna get out there and teach me how to do wedding videography. But what you might be teaching me is what makes a really killer wedding that lends itself to video. If I'm a bride, I'm gonna love that content because I'm gonna be like, if I want to have a really amazing video, I want to learn how to stage everything is so that it's gonna be the best it can be That's teaching them something that they didn't know yesterday. But it's not necessarily just, you know, the how twos and the ins and outs of your business think a little creatively about what it is that you can show somebody else that they might not have known yesterday. And I think content is a powerful education medium. If you look at all of the online education happening, creative life, all of these major platforms that are doing free online education now it's massive. And that's all content based stuff. So you have people teaching. You have videos, webinars, white papers, e books. Content is a huge vehicle for education, and you can use it in your business to do that too. Now, do not underestimate the value of entertaining someone. My case in point cat videos The Internet is full of cat videos like I've never seen so many cat videos in my life and people still watch cat videos and you're almost guaranteed to put a cat video on your Facebook page and get a bunch of people paying attention. Now, whether that does anything for your business is another matter entirely. But the point of all of that is that entertaining people has value, so don't take yourself too seriously all the time. It can be kind of fun to poke fun at yourself to have a little contest that I love when people do ridiculous things with their employees like they you know, we had. We had one company that actually brought in a dunking booth and put their CEO on live camera feed, and people could go online. And if they downloaded the E book, um, one of the interns would, for every download, would whip the ball at the dunking booth to put the CEO in the dunk tank. That's great entertainment, you know. I mean, have you guys seen the puppy cams? I'm line. I mean, I never knew I could waste two hours of my day watching little she be new puppies pile over each other. But truly, there's value and entertaining people because our whole lives are not about business. We don't work 24 hours a day, and we want to connect with companies that look, feel and act like us. And that's that human element of content that can really resonate with people. They say, Ah, there's a person with a heart and mind behind that and they actually thought to make me laugh today. So I love companies that are really irreverent and do it that way. Um, I won't. I won't articulate all of their stuff here because it would be, you know, NC 17. But there's a company called Thug Kitchen, which I absolutely love. And food blogger. Amazing recipes, all vegan. I think it is laden with profanity. It is the funniest thing I've ever read. So you're gonna have to take my word for it and go see it because that is entertainment, while giving me great recipes and attaching to my love of food. And I laughed the whole way there, which means I'm gonna come back again and again and again because they've entertained me while giving me something of value. So that works on the Internet in an amazing way. Encourage action, your content, even if it's entertaining. If it's educational, it should always have a purpose to get somebody to do something. Sometimes that could be just We want you to laugh, and we want to you to think we're awesome. Most of the time you want to give something somebody something a little more concrete than that. If you downloaded this e book, we'd love for you to sign up for our webinar Siri's. And here's the email place where you can do that. Or if you enjoyed this block post, we want you to subscribe. If you enjoyed this video, we'd like you to subscribe to our YouTube tail. So giving people something toe actually do tangibly. Those calls to action are simple but really important, and it's amazing the little tweaks that you can make to get those things toe function better. Even so, small calls to action put in places that you didn't expect well, actually reap amazing results. Now the other thing I'll tell you about this is be concise if you're gonna ask somebody to take an action. Don't ask them to take 12. Ask them to do one thing. We have very short attention spans online, and most of us have very busy days with lots of information. And we don't have time to go through this whole list of options and make decisions. There's a concept called The Paradox of Choice, which means it were given too many choices. We'll actually make no choice at all because there's too many options in front of us. However, if you give me a very clear thing to Dio, I will either choose to do it or not do it, and that becomes a very obvious thing. So if it's within my wheelhouse, I'll click. And there we go. Yes, ma'am. Putting up a lot of fitness videos on YouTube and tracking my insanity transformation a lot fun stuff, and I have a call to action at the end that says subscribe Teoh, my YouTube channel to follow along with the videos and then I also just have where people can find me like my website, my instagram and my twitter. Is that too many calls to action? No, I don't think so. because I think the one clear oneness subscribe to my YouTube channel. This is all informational like, if you want to find me those of the other places but you have a very clear subscribe is the thing I want you to dio And hopefully visually, that's the obvious thing. And at the front of the tail end of your video that says subscribe here and the rest of it's sort of ancillary, they're all there in a in a box, I guess. And that kinda little YouTube thing that they like, Yeah, yeah, subscribe. You know, Molly Pearson fitness. And then I just do the little icons. Kind of, Yeah, I think that's clear, because if subscribe is the main thing that you're asking people to do and it's pretty clear, I think what I mean about you know, confusing things is Don't ask me to subscribe to your blawg and sign up for your email newsletter and come to your webinar next week. Pick one, you know, and I think each piece of content should have a purpose in general, are blogged, tends to we try to drive people to our areas of our site that explain our services and the things that people can hire us to dio. If we're doing something in social media, it might be to drive somebody back to our site to sign up for email list. But those paths become very clear, and we're asking them to do something very concise on and frankly, are sightings work. It's kind of an ongoing. This is a This is a really tricky thing, to be honest. And it's the thing that most businesses and people building content strive for every day and still test. And there's people that go down to Should the button be green or blue or bigger? Smaller? I mean, there's any number of ways you contest calls to action, but what I'm just telling you is have one, which is a good start because a lot of content I read doesn't like at the end of it, I'm like, That's awesome! Now what? So I want the now what? After my content, like at the In the footer of my block post, it always is like this post question mark subscribe via email or RSS, and it has two little links so you can subscribe to the blood. Very simple or if a lot of companies do want to build their email lists that way, so they'll say, like this block post sign up for email newsletter, you know, really simple. There's little plug ins you can use that will automatically put a footer into every post. And so you could just write it once you have to put it in a re. Well, yes. So if you look up WordPress, footer, plug ins and stuff, you'll find them on their Eric and their business partners. We want to start a blawg. We have lots of ideas. His voice is completely different than mine. Okay, so would you suggest just one person typically like one voice for a block, or is too good or like is one better than the other? No, there's neither. One of them is better than the other. And there's there's tons of examples of blog's that are that vehicle either way, so they've decided to have a person right the block and that can work. Or there's sites like my friend Jason Falls has Social Media Explorer, and they have several different contributors, all with kind of different styles and voices, and it works because It's kind of the through line is topical, so it's all about social media and social media strategy. But all those different voices kind of writing around the same topic actually provides a lot of dimension and a lot of interest because it's more like a contributing staff to a magazine versus, you know, versus just one single voice. So I think you could do it. Either way, you're comfortable. But if you're gonna, if you're gonna both contribute, I wouldn't worry about trying to, like, make yourselves sound the same. Embrace the fact that you have different voices and let that be part of, Ah, let that be a feature you know of the whole thing is something that that you actually can build on before I flip this next slide. I want to tell you that there's one critical mistake that people make with content on a regular basis. But I don't want you to make because it's the one thing that content does not inherently do well, and it's be this guy. We've all read it online. We've read like the long, crummy sales page with a bunch of highlighted copy and by now, lots of exclamation marks. They go into those like crazy pitches and content actually doesn't do this very well. If you want it to be sustainable now, you could get it to do it once. But doing it on a repetitive basis will turn your audience off after after time goes by because the community wants to believe that you're creating content. That's an investment in them. So the hard sell is a problem. There's a difference between a call to action and I buy my stuff by my stuff. Oh my God, please buy my stuff. There's a really big difference between those things, and I think it's important to realize that not every opportunity is a sales opportunity. Some opportunities air just ones to connect summer ones to nurture relationships. And there's a time in a place for selling. But content itself really enhances the sales process rather than being the sales mechanism. And that distinction is actually really important. Sales usually happen outside the constant world content, reassures people that the by is a good idea. So the better content you have, the more people are gonna feel strong about their decision to buy from you, but they're not usually going to do it through the block post itself