Content Marketing Without the Huge Time Suck – Austin L Church – MicroConf Starter 2017

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0:14okay so how many of you have a lot of spare time yes a taker okay so I'm not going to you know belabor some of the things about getting and blogging sorry internet marketing and blogging being consistent with emailing your list that sort of thing because a lot of us already know the benefits of it so the purpose of this little talk is just to encourage you to think about not just the benefits of content marketing I've listed some of them here which you already know but to think about content marketing as a process that you can automate and optimize because very few of us have spare time that guy does I've

1:11got two kids at home I'm happy to show you photos later if you want to find me we've all got a lot of demands on our time and you know when push comes to shove sometimes the thing that's going to get pushed aside and neglected is marketing specifically content marketing so as you're trying to get your software product off the ground you're trying to you're wearing all the different hats with your startup it's really really hard to stay consistent with some of the things that down the road will help you get new customers so think about content marketing as a process that it's like anything else in your software you could

1:46automate and optimize and buy back a lot of your time so I do not any longer see content marketing as a huge time-suck here are some of my little things that I do to get back time some of them may work for you I'm going to go fast here the sort of the four pieces that I try to optimize and when you think about sorry when you think about a process you know it's helpful to break it down into its individual phases or steps so that you can you know get hyper focus on each one anyway several things to remember when you're getting started and trying to

2:21figure out what to write about for your startup your product develop a table of contents but think about the table of contents as an info product that you could build you know a lot of you will have landing pages you'll need lead magnets you want to give some piece of content away for free in exchange for people's email addresses well you know before you sort of kick start the whole blogging thing or maybe your blog is stalled out why not brainstorm your table of contents in advance so that when the time comes to write about a new topic you already have your list right there you know what sort

2:58of thing do you need to give away what thing could you brainstorm a table of contents for here are some examples I mean most of you are familiar with info products so I don't need to go into too much detail with that but you know here are some questions that you can ask as you're trying to think through topics right because I talked to people on a regular basis who aren't sure what to write about or maybe you're not even sure what your product is yet asking certain questions can help you identify the things that at least you're interested in and if you need more ideas

3:29then I recommend Amy hoist sail safari methodology you can go to forums you can go into comments on Amazon you can go a bunch of different places to figure out the questions that are being asked most commonly and I've found gold when I do that so let's get down to sort of the the block-and-tackle stuff I've identified two types of posts I'll call them thought leadership articles and you know the SEO focus blog posts that Josh just mentioned you may find yourself wanting to write both kinds I think that's fine you may not get a lot of traffic on the thought leadership posts you can definitely target keywords in

4:06your SEO focus posts but sometimes I don't want to do a tips post sometimes I want to write about you know work-life balance which sherry talked about and write about whatever you want to write about but keep in mind that it can fit into a product later on here's the thing that I help my clients with quite a bit if I'm doing ghost writing for them to write you don't have to write you can pull out your phone and you can record a voice memo what really stops a lot of people from staying consistent with content marketing is they can't find the time to just sit down at a computer and just

4:41write a first draft you don't have to you can record a voice memo all right you have a voice memo app on your phone take it out riff for eight to ten minutes and then once you have that audio you can send the audio to a transcriptionist on up work that's where mine is Klaus in Ireland or you know you can use the Rev app how many of you is anyone heard of the Rev app so that's where you record voice memos and then they'll transcribe it for you now once they you have that transcription what do you do well it's pretty easy at that point to shape it up

5:18into a blog post you know there's going to be a lot of dead space in your transcript but somebody even a writer you could pay a writer to do that for you so if you're short on time record the memo have it transcribed have somebody else whittle it down into a post now when it comes to actually publishing it you know obviously if you've got WordPress or craft or whatever you could do that yourself but again if you're short on time why wouldn't you hire somebody else to just load up the posts for you and ping you when it's ready for your review well that might be worth yes let's just

5:58appreciate that for a moment okay so I love unsplash it's where I sourced most of my images they're free license free royalty free commercial usage images all high-res some of them are just like you know very beautiful so that's where I'd get a lot of images don't waste a ton of time finding the perfect image find a good enough image and move on probably do want to include images in your post so to sort of wrap up this little part you've got a table of contents once you've finished writing all those topics a table of contents could become an info product or at least a lead

6:36magnet that you could use to build your email list right so let's look at like your time investment now you know two minutes to look and see what the next topic on your table of contents is you know ten minutes to record a new voice memo and then two minutes to send the link over to your transcriptionists you know doesn't take any of your time for the transcriptionist to do his or her work just a little bit of money same with you know you could actually set it up so that your transcriptionists sins the transcript to your writer your writer sends the finished draft to your VA your

7:11va loads everything up in your CN s of choice and then you'll probably want to review the posts at the very least before you publish it right so at this point your total time investment might be less than an hour and you might end up paying you know 50 to 100 bucks a blog post you might could go a little bit less than that but like I said I just encourage you as you break this up into pieces to think well you know you can optimize all these little steps right you guys are already used to that so when it once you've got the post live

7:45you know it's just basically a house in the woods unless you start sending people to it so what I do is I pull all my social updates from my latest blog post so I might identify ten to fifteen tweets in a blog post pull those out you know I can upload those in mass to buffer using this other third-party app called book buffer I also love smarter cue some of you might be familiar with Edgar or a Kerr post there's various apps out there that allow you to do social media scheduling I can tell you later why I like smarter cue but create a content library there and then just

8:23recycle your content right so at this point I probably have five hundred tweets already loaded up in Edgar or smarter queue and those just posts so when I'm here I don't have to worry about keeping my socials fresh also wait about seven days and then syndicate your posts over to medium I mean there's a wordpress plugin that will do that automatically for you if you don't use WordPress maybe hire your VA to manually post on medium for you also some of you have already done this I love zapier they're a bunch of little sharing things that I haves apps that do for me so one of them is actually this will be

9:00familiar to most of you you you know my RSS feed ping zapier and then zapier Auto creates or sorry auto post stuff for me or it creates an email newsletter and convertkit which I use so I know that was a lot some of those tips may work for you some of them may not work for you at all regardless say here's this thing that will be really important for driving growth in my business it's called content marketing and if you take each one of the steps and think about how much time how much of your own time you can remove from each step you can stay

9:36consistent with some of these supporting activities without creating a huge time-suck for yourself if you want the slides you can go to that link and obviously Shai will have notes so thanks for being such a good listener

9:57you