Today, we’re going to talk about content marketing and some simple ways to generate creative content on demand for your business that doesn’t suck. Content is going to rank in Google, you’re going to be getting organic traffic for the rest of your life and the life of your business and website. But when you optimize and create content, when optimized correctly, then yes, you can get content for a long time. So for those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn. I’m the creator of doneforyou.com and we specialize in creating offers, building sales funnels, and building marketing automation systems that help our clients grow and thrive online. And today, and this week, we have been talking about content marketing and search engine optimization and all things having to do with free traffic.
Promoting your website: Content Blogging vs. Paid Traffic
We have this blog post we’re going to go through. This is 5 No-Brainer Content Creator Tactics. First of all, create content sucks. The worst times suck of having a digital business, is creating the content, creating the blogs, and stuff required to make that business run. At the end of the day, you create a website, you create a sales funnel and you put all of that stuff online and it just sits there until you either create content, which brings you traffic, or you start paying for traffic, which brings you traffic.
If you are paying for traffic, you can turn something on, and immediately, it’s rock and roll quickly. By the end of the day, you’re getting clicks. Hopefully, you’re getting leads. Hopefully, you’re getting sales. Create content blogging, of course, it just takes a longer, it takes a long time, because not only do you have to write the blog post, you also then have to do some on-page SEO, some on-page search engine optimization. You need to learn about that. Or, you can just be fucking lucky and you write a blog post and then boom, you’re starting to get paid traffic, or you’re starting to get free traffic. But that never happens. But writing content, I mean a good 1500 to 2000 word blog post, takes what? About six hours to write. And that’s if all you’re doing is writing.
If you’re like me and you have pings and notifications and messages and emails and all kinds of crazy stuff, then it doesn’t necessarily work nearly as well. Because then, you have that the switching, the context switching cost, which is where you’re pulled off of a task, then you have to, it takes like on average 60 minutes to kind of re-center. It’s at least double that for writing blog posts because writing blog posts is no fun.
What I have been doing, what you have been witnessing, which is let’s get on 10:00, we record a 20-minute video. We have that transcribed. Then, we post that to the blog post and we get ranked for some blogs. We get ranked for some keyword phrases and everybody’s happy. The Google gods are happy. The created content is happy. We’re getting free traffic and we’re able to work with an audience a little bit. We’re creating a video, which is awesome. There are so many different ways that we can use video. That is what I’ve been into lately, or at least since the beginning of the pandemic. It is what it’s evolved into and it’s working pretty well.
5 No-Brainer Content Creator Tactics
1. Create Content Online
You need content so that people know, like, and trust you. They bond with you and engage with you. They become aware of you and they aren’t necessarily being sold the first thing. As soon as they see you, they’re not necessarily being sold something. You must have content. Super important. All the big media buyers, every business that is growing quickly, it’s not just ads. There’s a lot of content in there. It might be content that is sent to you through an email list. It might be content, as an advertorial, but it is always content. There are always videos. There are always sales videos, there are YouTube channels, there are Instagram posts. There’s always content in the mix, even if it isn’t necessarily just blog posts.
From a creative content marketing standpoint, basically, you want to make sure that you are creating something at least a couple of times a week. I always try to tell me, all of our clients, you want to make sure that you’re creating, if it’s two a week, three a week, some piece of content. It might be a checklist, might be a blog post, whatever, but you want to make sure you’re doing something relevant, consistently. Now, first of all, don’t get all caught up about getting started, because, at the end of the day, everybody is met with a blank screen at some point. So what we end up doing and what we’ve talked earlier this week about, is doing keyword research and finding out what your prospects, what your readers want you to talk about.
If you do a little tiny bit of research before you go live or before you write something, then you have some direction. Being that you create content, being that you’re an expert, a subject matter expert, or else you wouldn’t necessarily have a business. Being an expert, or having the presence of mind to hire a great writer or somebody who is an expert that can write on your behalf, then you can create, that person can create content. It all starts with keyword phrases. It starts with this idea of trying to figure out what other people are searching for. Because if you know what people are typing into Google, you know what kind of content you can write that will attract them into your world, that will attract them to your blog post, or your website, or your sales videos, or any of that other stuff.
2. Create Videos
It is always where it starts, is the keyword research. Once you have an idea of where the keyword research takes you or what you need to do inside the keyword research, you can write a blog post. You can create a video, you can build a checklist, you can do whatever. It all starts with a keyword, a keyword phrase that you’re trying to start from. Now, I choose to do the video first. I have been doing this for so long that I don’t need scripting… And I’ve done literally, 17,000 calls. I’m okay on my feet because I’m at a standing desk. I’m fucking chipper this morning. I don’t know why. But anyway, so I’m okay on the fly, talking about this stuff, from a creative content marketing standpoint or email marketing or whatever.
Basically, what I’m doing is kind of what I revealed yesterday, was these videos oftentimes kind of rehash old blog posts and stuff. Or, at least get in and re-optimize them. But the video itself gives you leverage into the future.
Video is the most accepted form to create content right now.
People watch the video, people listen to audio, which you can pull the audio out of the video, and then transcription is super cheap. It’s $1.25 a minute. One 20 minute video gives you like 4,000 written words that then, you can be posting on your blog tomorrow. That’s what we do. If you can discipline yourself to create video and you can set up a little studio or whatever. I mean, I got a little camera there. I got some lights here, which is going to screw up everything. But if you can discipline yourself to just do a little bit of video every single day, where you’re talking about something in your market, something that your audience will care about or like, then you can do anything with that.
You can reuse, repurpose, you can package it in a book. You can put the videos together as a course. But video content is the most mobile. You can do whatever you want with it. So that’s why the video is good.
3. Content Curation
Another option is content creation or content curation, I should say. When you create content curation, you’re using other blog posts as, or other content to inspire you. And what we have found, I mean, look at Pinterest. Pinterest is nothing but content curation. It’s seventeen things you can do with two-by-fours. And that one blog post has no original content. All it is is a summary of seventeen other blog posts that all have something about two-by-fours. That’s all content curation is. It’s assembling other people’s content into a more useful blog post or a more useful piece of content.
And that when done right, when done correctly, can bring a lot of traffic. I mean, some of those Pinterest articles, they get two, three, four thousand visitors a day, because they click it on Pinterest, “Oh, gee I have all kinds of two by fours in the garage. I wonder what I’m going to build today. Oh, here’s a blog. Here’s a post.” Blah, blah, blah. And then they pick something. “I’m going to build a step stool out of two by fours because this blog post had a really cute step stool and I clicked through, and here are the plans for it.”
That’s all content curation is. It’s using, it’s reusing and packaging other people’s content in a new way. It is the value that you bring as a content curator. You aren’t creating content, you’re packaging it differently. No different than a museum curator. They don’t create art, they just display the art. They source it, they bring it in-house, they display it, they light it, they just package it differently. It’s a big difference. Now, repurposing content is another one. What I’m doing right here, is repurposing content. I’m taking content that was written two or three years ago, and I’m refreshing it. We are adding, we’re going to add a video to this. We’re going to add the transcript to it. This is all still great stuff. You can pull out all the old links and all that other kind of stuff and add new links.
4. Repurposing Content
But at the end of the day, we’re refreshing this content. We’re repurposing it. I’ve been writing about digital business for 14 years now. There’s very little that I write new. I mean, I have a treasure trove of email copy that I just recycle. Furthermore, I rarely come up with new emails. I usually recycle something that I sent four years ago. And that’s the beauty of repurposing content. Same with sales copy. When it’s our stuff, I’ve already written so many sales videos and done so many webinars, that I use a piece of software called Scrivener. And basically, it’s like a, it’s an author’s tool. You can save your scripts and you can save your email copy, and you can save whatever. Any text-based copy, you can save into the Scrivener and then you can drag it around and drop it and it’s an author’s tool.
But earlier this year, I went and loaded up all of our old email copies. I loaded up a bunch of webinars. I loaded up sales copy that I wrote, that I’ve written a long, long time ago. And that is kind of, it’s just a rehash. I rarely come up with something from scratch now, because I just repurpose all the old stuff. After you’ve been at it a while, you can repurpose your old stuff, or you can repurpose stuff that you find that you like, you can just rewrite it.
5. Get into the Habit of Making Lists
List content, it works so well online. Having lists, the top 100 lists, the top 10 lists, the 5, top 5 lists, whatever, a good bit of very clickbait content are list posts. So it can be 7 WordPress plugins that you need. It’s a list. It’s a list of 7 plugins that maybe has a description above, below each one.
Or 100 ways to make chocolate chip cookies, whatever it might be, a list post of you just have links to 100 different chocolate chip cookie recipes. So that’s a list post that is content curated. So, there are lots of different ways to cut it up, but just know, list posts are very, they go viral pretty easily when presented correctly. And they end up having a lot of traction and Google loves list posts, because people like to share them a lot because you can. It’s good, it’s like a treasure trove of information all in nice little bite-sized chunks.
With that, the 5 ways of creating content as simply and as quickly as possible, the winner for me is absolute video. If you are okay with creating video, if you don’t mind holding a mobile phone up in front of you, or you don’t mind setting up a little setup like this or doing a webcam with the Streamyard, which is how we’re recording this, if you don’t mind that stuff, it is the simplest and easiest and quickest way to create content that you can then work with in the future.
Like I said, in our process, we create the video, I take the YouTube video, upload it into rev.com, which is where we get it transcribed, pay $1.25 a minute. So if it’s a 20-minute video, it costs $30 to $33, or whatever. Get it transcribed and then it kicks out the transcript. We post that on the blog post and then we just do some light formatting, Grammarly kind of checks and that’s it. And then we wait to see how it ranks.
And then once it starts ranking, we go back in and we rehab it and do sub-headlines and all that other stuff. So it becomes just a content optimization thing. But at the end of the day, content is how you get free traffic. You just have to invest the time in creating the content, or you can invest the money and save the time and get paid traffic. So it’s really, it’s up to you, how you want to go.
For Questions and Guide
If you would like to learn more about paid traffic, setting up sales funnels, building marketing automation, having my team kind of put all of it together for you, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill in the little form and we’ll schedule a call with you and kind of walk through everything. If you have any questions at all, or if you would like to ask a question for a future episode, go to doneforyou.com/blog.
