Shownotes
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- Publishing content online shows people that you are an expert and you know exactly what you’re talking about. It also allows you to help people, helping nurture your relationship with potential clients.
- If you want to focus on Search Engine Optimisation to grow your business, creating regular content is a great way to increase your chances of being found by Google.
- Planning your content in advance is a great way to ensure you always have something to put out. Two to three months in advance is ideal, so make sure you schedule in the time to batch content where you can.
- A great way to come up with content ideas is to go to your customers and ask them exactly what it is they want. Change the way in which you interact with your customers and listen to what they’re asking, looking for questions that come up on a regular basis.
- Another great way to create content is to take inspiration from people who are in a similar field from you. Obviously, you shouldn’t copy what people are doing, but looking at the topics they’re covering could give you an idea of how you could provide new insight into the matter.
- Use answerthepublic.com to search for keywords and it will tell you exactly what people are searching for in relation to those words.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…
Although batching content is a great way to get ahead, you need to make sure you’re not batching so far ahead that the content you’re create becomes irrelevant. Stick to two-three months to be safe.
HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS
- Launching A Product Online (My Key Findings) - 01:46
- Why Should You Be Putting Content Out - 07:21
- Coming Up with Amazing Content Ideas - 09:50
- Batching Content - 17:15
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE
Transcript below
Hello and a super warm welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. How are you? Did you have a nice weekend? If it’s Monday or are you having a nice week?
Well I made a recording this on a Monday which is unusual but I have to get organized before I go away and I’m going away today. So yeah I had a lovely weekend. It was really really nice. Manage to take some time off which is super important and sometimes very hard to do as an entrepreneur. And also I’ve had a really really busy few weeks. I knew the first few months of the year were going to be super busy but to be honest I think I wore myself out a little bit quickly.
So I want to just talk about that just briefly about back in Episode 52. I did an episode that was focused around my seven steps to launching or selling something online. And the reason I did this at this point was because I was right in the middle of launching something online and I am now very pleased to say because I was nervous at the time to commit but it is launched and I launched a course. And you know what I just wanted to touch on it because I know when I did the episode, I was right in the middle of it. And I think I said I was tired and it was hard work but I just want to kind of tell you my findings if you like of me going through that experiment and I guess the first thing was that it was fascinating doing it all myself which sounds daft. This is what I do for a living. I help people with their social media but I also help them funnels. I love doing funnel stuff. I love doing sales pages, landing pages, email marketing... All that sort of stuff. So I’d done it for lots of clients and I’d launch lots of things online. However I hadn’t actually launched something myself and I wanted to be able to get a feeling of what it was like to be sat there waiting for the webinar to go live and wondering whether anybody’s gonna be on it. And I knew I would only be able to do that myself if I launched something online.
Also I do have ambitions to have more products online, more ways that you can learn with me and work with me that is open to everybody no matter where you are or no matter really the size of your budget. Such because my aim is that they’re not going to be over expensive. So anyway I put together my launch process. I launched my course online and it was awesome and I don’t mean like it was awesome, I made loads of money I’m going to retire now. I mean just the clarity in action was unbelievable. The fact that actually doing it and going through it it just gave me so much good stuff to learn and think about and I’ve been doing a lot of work recently as you know with James Wedmore and we’ve talked about taking action and even if you fail or how you deem you fail, you’re still learning and therefore you haven’t failed at all. And I think that was the thing holding me back all this time.
Now the course has been ready for ages. I have had this idea for an entire year and I sat on it and the reason I sat on it was because I was scared. I thought what if I launch and no one wants it. What if I launch and no one buys it? What if I put a webinar on and no one attends? And do you know what I could have gone through that process and that could have been the truth and it could have been that I didn’t sell any or no one attended. No that wasn’t the truth, I was very lucky. And please don’t get me wrong. I don’t take it for granted at all that people give me their valuable time not only like you guys to listen to the podcast which is amazing but also to come and attend a class and learn about content creation.
So I was so very grateful the people did turn up but like I said, it was the fact of what I learned along the way, the tech problems that I had, the problems in what currency to sell it in. I had all intentions to sell it in dollars and then right before we went live with it, there was an issue about they couldn’t put dollars into a Sterling Bank account and all these various things that you think because I do this I should know but obviously some bets like that I wouldn’t have got involved with the client would have done that. So yeah I just wanted it like that touched on the facts of how it went, how I felt about it and I have to say I was buzzing when it finished. I was so excited. Now the course is still open if you wanted to go and buy the cause then please do so. It’s over at teresaheathwareing.com/cause. I’m also going to link to that in the show notes and it’s a course on how you create content for social media. It goes to the four steps that I use in my business. So anyway I’m not turning this into a sales pitch, I just wanted to mention it. But the thing that was the best thing about the whole process was like I said the clarity I got by actually launching and then secondly the fear that I have that held me back all that time literally just disappear did and nothing felt like it was wrong or nothing felt like it failed.
Everything felt amazing. If I’m honest then like I said don’t get me wrong. I’ve not sat here thinking right I can put my feet up, retire now. But I’m just saying even you know with the small amount of money that the course made, it still was so good to understand the process to go through it. To know what it feels like to hear people’s responses, to see how people get involved and also to realize that that fear is absolute rubbish but actually, it was me holding myself back and those fears were not genuine. They weren’t real. And I should have just gone and done it a long time ago. So you know what I’m hope that your sat here listening thinking. Teresa, I needed to hear this right now. Because if you’re holding back. If there is some fear that you’re thinking I can’t do this because... Because what will people think of me? Because who you know someone might say something. Because People might think it’s not good enough. People might think I’m a fraud. Any of those reasons just ignore them and go ahead and do you know what. If you do it and it fails as far as you see as a failure then so what you’ve done it great. Brilliant. Learn from it okay. People didn’t learn that thing or that thing didn’t go how expected. Let’s do it again or do it differently. So also I want to remind you that back at episode 47 again are linked in the show notes.
I interviewed James Wedmore and we talked a whole load about this and about how fear holds business owners back. So please go and listen to that was a great episode. And like I said, I’ve sat on this course for a year and not done anything and I shouldn’t have done it. I should have done it ages ago. Okay. Anyway let’s get on with today’s content.
Now, inspired by the fact that I have this new online course and one of the things that I talked about in the Facebook group because with the course, you get a free Facebook group where I’m in and one of the things I talked to them about was, repurpose and content. Now I have done an episode here on the podcast the back. It was back at episode 25 but it occurred to me as we were talking about repurposing content that they actually had to have some content in the first place. And obviously, I have regular content that I put out. The podcast is the main thing. But I wanted to talk about how you can come up with content ideas if you’re going to be putting some content out but really quickly first. Why do you even need any content? Why do you need to go to the effort of writing a blog or doing a blog or creating a podcast? Well There’s a couple of really key reasons why you definitely need to think about it. First of, it shows that you’re an expert to the rest of the world. Obviously I can’t sit here and witter on in your ear if I don’t know what I’m talking about or certainly don’t have a good idea of what I’m talking about. So for me, it shows the world that you know what you’re talking about because you can either talk about it or write about it or film yourself about it.
So for me, putting something out there regularly that says “Look I know my subject is really important.” The other thing is obviously you want to help people. So people who come and buy your product and service it’s because you’re helping them with a need. It’s because they have a problem and your product or service fixes it. So if there is more support you can give around that then great. And through a blog or a blog or a podcast is a great way of doing that. It’s a great way of saying look you might buy my products here but I’ve got all this additional information here so if you’re an estate agent for instance you might provide information on how to dress a house ready for a viewing or things to consider if you’re moving to a new area. You’re trying to find ways and information that basically you can support the product or service that you’re actually selling. So like a regular content is great for that reason.
It also is a great thing to put out on social media because again when we’re struggling for social media ideas that’s one of the ideas that we put out there. Obviously my podcast goes out on all my platforms every single week. So definitely think about that. And also if you’re hosting these things on your site if you’re putting a blog on your Web site or I put a transcript to my podcast then those keywords all that text is really gonna help improve your site from a search engine optimization point of view i.e. when people put it into Google they’re going to hopefully find you a little bit easier. So how can you come up with ideas of what to actually write? Now if you’re struggling to think: what am I going to use as my media i.e. is it going to be a blog or vlog or a video or whatever and head back to Episode 22. When we talk about how.. the imports are coming up with consistent content and in that episode I actually talk out the different types of media you can use so why you should do a blog or why you should do a podcast. So definitely go and check that one out. But today, we’re going to be looking at how we come up with content ideas for those bits of content that you’re putting out.
So one of the first things I do is I try and plan ahead. Now try is the big word here. I don’t always succeed. I don’t always manage it. Sometimes I can do really well and other times I can be recording it the week for it has to go out like this episode so it doesn’t always work brilliantly. However I aim to plan ahead and I aim to plan and think about what content I’m doing. So I’d like you to try and thing two three months in advance and I want you to sit down and book some time out where you can sit down and actually put these ideas down because I find doing something in one chunk is so much easier because your brain is sat in that position.
Your brain is like yeah okay that’s cool. I know what we’re talking about this week or I know what I’m focusing on right now rather than often our worlds would go from one thing to another to another to another to another. And our brain can’t keep up or it takes a minute or two for us to come up with a new idea. So if you’re just literally sat down thinking right what content ideas can I come up with then doing that in one easy go will be much much more helpful. And like I said thinking about I’m going to try and do two or three months worth of content. Now the other thing you’re going to need to know at this point is how frequently are you going to be putting content out there because obviously that makes a big difference to how much content you need to create or come up with. So for me obviously mine are weekly so I would have one a week for two months which is why I probably don’t go that far in advance. Two months is probably the maximum I’ll go in advance in terms of the podcast. But if you’re doing say every other week then obviously you might you could get three months worth of content done.
So definitely have a think about those two things. And then I’ve got three kind of main things that I do in order to come up with content ideas.
So the first thing I do is I go to my customers and I ask them. So I speak obviously and I train and I speak to people in the course and the new Facebook page and I am constantly talking to clients and different businesses. So one of the things I try and do is: I try and listen to what they’re asking me. I try and listen to the questions that they have and it’s normally the questions that as the business owner or as the person providing the service you think oh man i’m so tired of that question how many times have I been asked that those are the questions that you want to be thinking about. Those are the questions that you want to be answering in something like a blog or a podcast. So like I said first thing changed the way you interact with your customers and be using them like a you know a sponge suck up all the information from them what they need what questions that they got. If you haven’t gotten the examples that you can think of straight away go and speak to some get on the phone drop them an email have a conversation with them and say What are you struggling with right now. What could you do with some help with or what part about what I offer.? Do you not understand and ask them to actually give you feedback something like Facebook groups is a great way. If you have a group then it’s a great way to survey your audience. Obviously sending surveys out... Last week’s episode talked a lot about surveys so you could just be setting out questions try and find that information as well. And then the other thing that you can do with your Facebook group is you can have questions that people have to answer to actually get into the group. So why did you change those questions or look at those questions and decide. Can I answer that? Can I ask a question that really helps me get the key information about what they need? Another really good area to get inspiration about what to post and the kind of content ideas that are working well is go and have a look at people in your industry.
The next place I would think about looking for content ideas and subject matter that you can come up with for your vlog or blog or podcast I’m going to say that a million times sounds like anyway.
Another place you can go look at is competitors and industry bodies and people who do what you do now maybe not direct competitors. And I’m not saying go and copy their content. I’m just saying go and have a look at the types of things they’re talking about.
Now obviously in some industries... Well in lots of industries there’s gonna be huge overlaps in terms of subject matter you know even though social media is a massive area and a massive subject. You know if you type in Twitter chats there’s probably hundreds and hundreds of blogs and podcast episodes about what a Twitter chat is so don’t think you can’t come up with an idea that someone else has already done. The important thing is obviously don’t go and copy what they’ve written. Just use the subjects as a bit of an idea in terms of something you can come up with. Or if you’ve seen that someone’s done a post on something and you think oh yeah I’ve got a great example of what I can say about that then great.
Have a think about that as well. And then the last one. The one that I really liked and I think is such a cool resource. And whenever I tell people they get a bit blown away by it is a website called answerthepublic.com. Now what it does is you can look at keywords so you type in some keywords into this Website and then it tells you what people have been searching for to do those keywords on the Internet.
So as an example I just typed in the word landing pages and it came up with loads of different questions like how to create a landing page on Facebook? How to write a landing page?? How to avoid landing page redirects? How to create landing pages? How to have landing pages in WordPress? What else has it got in here? What are landing pages good for?
So if I wanted to write content around landing pages then obviously this is a great place for me to look and it gives me some really good ideas and it’s what people are actually typing into the Internet. So if your title is exactly the question that appears on this site then obviously it’s going to help you and your site be found and you’re going to help and support your potential customers in giving them lots of information. So like I said I love this site. It’s in the show notes I’ll link up to it there it’s answer the public dot com.
Okay so we’ve sat down and we’ve come up with some content ideas and the idea is that you’ve given yourself enough different ideas to plan what you’re going to be talking about on each episode of the podcast. Each video each blog so you’ve written down these ideas and you’ve planned what’s going to happen. Now like I said, frequency is important because you need to know how often you’re going to posting.
And one of the things that I find interesting when I’m bashing...
