content marketing

Content brands live and die based on your ability to come up with content ideas. The more ideas you come up with, the easier it is to create content uninterrupted. However, as we create more pieces of content, it becomes more difficult to think of additional content ideas.

Many content creators don’t want to talk about the same thing twice, and as they cover more ground, there are fewer unique topics left to cover. If you always have more than enough ideas, you’ll avoid the stress associated with a lack of content ideas and rushing content so you maintain consistent.

Once a week, you should pick a day to come up enough content ideas to cover an entire month. As you think about new content ideas, here are some resources you can seek out to fuel your idea generation.

#1: Listen To Podcasts

Not only can you learn a lot by listening to podcasts, but you can also come up with great content ideas. Any part of the conversation can spark a new idea, and in longer episodes, you’re bound to come across multiple content ideas.

Every part of the conversation has the potential to yield great content ideas. Whether the guest is sharing strategies or the host is sharing a personal story, each conversation presents the opportunity to come up with your next blog post, video, or episode.

#2: Read Books

The most successful authors tend to be voracious readers. Similar to a podcast episode, books provide an array of ideas and concepts. The great thing about a book is that you can look at the table of contents to get an idea of what will get covered. 

Sometimes, I’ll browse on Amazon and read through the table of contents rather than actually buy the book. This helps me come up with additional content ideas. If I like the table of contents, I’ll get the book through Kindle Unlimited and start reading through it.

Each page has a new content idea waiting to be discovered. If you think like a content creator rather than just as a reader, it will be easier for you to find those ideas. Don’t be afraid to underline or write in the book you’re reading so you can go back to the notes later.

As a bonus, if you’re browning for books on Amazon, read through the book reviews. You’ll get a better idea of what readers like and don’t like about the book, and these reviews can help you come up with better content ideas.

#3: Watch Videos

While this is similar to the other two strategies, video is the most engaging form of content. Furthermore, if you’re watching videos on a place like YouTube, you can read through the comments for additional ideas.

On some websites, the comments are actually better than the original content (I personally learn a lot from Seeking Alpha comments). Some people prefer to watch videos while others prefer reading content or listening to it. You can incorporate multiple content formats when coming up with ideas or choose the one that best works for you.

#4: Browse Through Quora

Quora is a site where people ask questions they want the answers to. While this sounds simplistic, the entire concept of this platform presents a gold mine for content creators. You can search “social media marketing” on Quora and see what questions people are currently asking about the topic. These questions can form the baseline for your next piece of content.

If you already have an audience, you can similarly ask them what they want you to create content about next. I use a combination of an open ended question and a poll to figure out what my audience wants.

Regardless of whether you have an audience or not, Quora is a great place to find potential content ideas because people asking questions on that platform are telling you exactly what they want.

#5: Look At Your Popular Pieces 

Coming up with content ideas isn’t just about writing a list of ideas. It’s about writing a list of ideas that have a shot at gaining traction and resonating with your audience.

Looking at your most successful pieces will help you come up with ideas that can have similar success. When I saw that my most popular YouTube videos were about investing, I decided to take the leap and create more investing videos on my channel.

That decision significantly accelerated the channel’s growth and I am excited to see what it will look like a year from now. The more content you produce, the better understanding you’ll have of which topics resonate with your audience the most.

#6: Write About Personal Experiences

When you include personal experiences in your writing, your potential content ideas greatly multiplies. Personal experiences also help you build a deeper relationship between you and your audience.

When someone shares a personal experience, it more deeply connects that person with the people who hear their story. Not all personal experiences are enjoyable to write about. This doesn’t mean writing a list of all of the traumatic experiences in your life and turning them all into blog posts.

You can most certainly some of those experiences and turn them into blog posts, but even a mundane day can hold exciting content ideas if you know where to look and how to present your ideas.

#7: Use The Socratic Questioning Method

You can get ideas from the previous content you published. View each piece of content you published (or are working on) as a beginner. What questions would you ask? What would you want to know about the topic if you were starting fresh?

Content creators often forget their audiences don’t know as much as them. It’s easy to believe that as you level up your knowledge, your audience has leveled up their knowledge at the same pace.

Just because you know something that you see as obvious doesn’t mean most people in your audience will see it in the same way. In my investing videos, I often talk about the P/S ratio because that’s a metric for growth investors to determine if a stock is overvalued or undervalued.

However, I say the entire word (price-to-sales ratio) rather than just saying P/S ratio because not everyone in my audience knows about that ratio. 

When you act like a beginner, you’ll find new content ideas. This goes well beyond just saying the entire word rather than an acronym. The more questions you ask, the more ideas you’ll end up with.

Have you wanted to branch out and write content about a variety of different topics, but you weren’t sure how to proceed with building a brand in the process? It’s actually possible to grow content brands around multiple topics without spending the entire day on each brand.

I first learned this truth when I started to create YouTube videos and Medium articles around personal finance and investing. While some people who want to learn about business and digital marketing would naturally want to learn about those areas as well, that truth doesn’t apply to everyone.

However, rather than just create content around personal finance, I decided to build it out into an additional brand. I thought I’d share some of my experiences with this journey to help anyone who wants to create content in multiple industries.

Set Up An Email List For Both Content Brands

For the digital marketing focused brand (this one), I have a variety of opt-ins and summits already in place. I’ve been in the digital marketing space longer which is why I have more assets.

Statistically speaking, the more opt-in pages you have, the more email subscribers you’ll get. That’s simply because you have more opt-in pages to promote. You give your audience multiple choices, and only one of those choices needs to be a good one for them to join your email list.

I don’t have the same amount of choices available for the personal finance brand. In fact, I just have a single opt-in page that encourages people to join the Become A Better Investor newsletter. 

It’s as basic as it looks and took less than 15 minutes to set up on ConvertKit. Despite how little effort it took to set up that opt-in page, it has an opt-in conversion rate just north of 40%. That’s a really great rate for something that didn’t take me too long to create. 

I don’t even provide a free guide, video series, report, or anything of that nature. Just the encouragement to subscribe in exchange for great content. Most people would love a 40% opt-in conversion rate, and the fact I could do it with a page as simple as that has made me think of additional content brands I can build in the future. 

Pump Out The Content

A 40% conversion opt-in rate means nothing if you only get 10 people to see your opt-in page each month. Sure, an extra 4 subscribers each month is better than nothing, but it won’t move the needle.

Content is at the core of any content brand. The moment you stop producing content is the moment your brand starts to die. 

For the personal finance brand, I produce 1 article and 1 video per day. For the digital marketing brand, I produce 1 blog post per day along with Breakthrough Success episodes.

While that output can sound daunting, it only takes me an hour each day to write the blog posts and outline videos. It takes some extra time to then create the videos and podcast episodes, but I rarely spend more than 2.5 hours a day on creating free content.

Find the workflow that best works for you. For me, I always start the day by writing articles. Then I do videos later in the day.

Build Relationships

Relationships are vital for every business. Content brands are no exception to the rule. Get involved in Facebook Groups related to your niche (easier than starting your own) and start a podcast to get into more conversations with people in your niche. 

Browsing through Facebook Groups 15-30 minutes each day can make a big difference for your content brands. Becoming an active member in each group you participate in will get you in front of plenty of additional people.

Interviewing 1 person each week for two podcasts can further amplify your reach. Breakthrough Success has done so much for my business, and I’ve recently brought back the Ditch The Job Podcast for the personal finance brand.

Monetize Your Brand

You can either create products or promote other people’s products through your affiliate links. You can apply the same concept to a service.

It’s important to monetize your content brand early on because that’s how it becomes sustainable. While promoting an offer is a common path to monetization, you can also run ads although the former offers more potential. In my case, I like to do a combination of both.

The more income streams you have, the better. 

I prefer to focus on offers that don’t require as much maintenance once they are already set up (i.e. books and courses). This makes it easier to address multiple brands and build out product offerings for each one.

Repurposing your content is one of the most important things you can do to get more traffic.

It’s what allows you to become a top influencer on multiple social networks and grow a massive audience.

Here are some tips for repurposing your content

 

Tip #1: Always Start With Video

Video is the easiest content to repurpose. You can turn your video into an audio file. You can transcribe the video and turn it into a blog post. You can pull out quotes from each video, tweet them out, and turn them into pictures.

Here’s an example of how I took one of my quotes, tweeted it, and turned it into an Instagram Picture.

It’s a lot less blurry on Instagram. I promise 😉

 

Tip #2: Break Down Your Bigger Content

I have a ton of long videos on YouTube with some of them over an hour long. Earlier in 2019 I did a presentation on how to Grow And Monetize Your Podcast. I then decided to upload the entire presentation to my YouTube channel.

It’s a little over 40 minutes including the Q&A that commenced at the end of the presentation. Will some people watch the entire video. Yes. In fact, some people have watched this entire video.

However, it’s a 40 minute long video. Who has the time for a 40 minute video? Most people won’t have that much time to watch a single video. That’s why I recently took a closer look at this video and created a shorter version with some of the best clips put together.

I haven’t released the video yet, but the editing for it is done.

I can go back to any of my longer videos and break them up into a series of videos. That’s something I will do for all of my future public speaking presentations. An hour long presentation has at least 7 videos inside of it.

You can do something similar for interviews too.

A while ago, I pulled out a snippet from an interview I did with Chandler Bolt and turned that snippet into its own video.

This snippet is about whether it’s worth it for an author to have their own blog and write content for the blog that could have went to their books.

While a future snippet would have have been edited in further detail instead of the static image, it shows what you can do with an interview.

I don’t invest as much time into creating snippets like these as I do with the 30-60 minute presentations I conduct. However, it is a great way for podcasters to expand their reach on YouTube with something different than what most podcasters are doing.

I see myself providing snippets like these in the future with more detailed editing.

 

Tip #3: Batch Your Repurposing Efforts

Earlier I created a video about how I batch 3 months of podcast episodes in under 7 days. I even wrote a blog post about it, and that content batching article did pretty well on LinkedIn.

However, you can also batch your repurposing efforts. That way, not only are you producing a ton of content, but you’re also doing a ton of marketing in the process.

What do I mean by marketing?

Well, when I last checked, the LinkedIn Article I published had 46 likes. The cool thing about LinkedIn and most other social networks is that you can see all of the people who liked your article.

Yes. I did like my own article. Don’t judge me 😉

When you write a blog post, schedule it on LinkedIn and Medium right away. If you have 12 blog posts scheduled over the next 3 months, take the extra 2-5 minutes per blog post to share that content with your other audiences.

That’s 46 likes I don’t get just by publishing that blog post on my blog. And that’s 46 people who came across my content…some for the first time.

Publishing your blog posts on places like LinkedIn and Medium boost your discoverability.

When you publish on your blog, it’s your own home on the web, but you have to push out the content yourself.

LinkedIn and Medium do some of the pushing for you. Hence the 46 likes.

 

Tip #4: Get Your Content To Work Together

This blog post has some of my videos in it which is by design. When I write blog posts, I always look at my YouTube videos as inspiration. The more of them I can put in the blog post, the better.

Not only is it because I want to grow my channel (subscribe here), but including videos in blog posts will also increase the time people spend on your site. This will help you rank higher on Google and turn more of your readers into subscribers.

But I also have my Instagram picture in there…and even a GIF which 99% of my blog posts don’t have (expect more GIFs in the future).

When you repurpose your content, the strategy comes into play when you get your content to work together.

In my blog posts, I emphasize YouTube. When I put blog posts like these on LinkedIn and Medium, they also drive traffic to my YouTube channel.

When people are on my YouTube channel, I’m leading them to one of my free offers outside of YouTube. When someone subscribes for that free offer, they get led to…among other places…my blog and some of my social networks.

The great thing about intentional repurposing is that you can create an infinite loop that sends people to each of your social networks and other platforms.

And for all of these platforms, my main call-to-action is something that grows my email list. Because that’s where the money is 🙂

 

In Conclusion

Content repurposing is a fantastic marketing strategy that makes omnipresence easier to achieve.

It’s what I use to become present on so many platforms and it’s a big growth driver.

What are your thoughts on these tips? Do you have any additional content repurposing tips? Sound off in the comments below.

I love content batching. It’s the reason I can remain consistent on so many platforms without everything spiraling out of control.

Here’s the entire list of places where I put out new content…

• Breakthrough Success Podcast
• Breakthrough Success Radio
• Profitable Public Speaking Podcast
• My YouTube Channel
• This Blog

If I had to do a little bit of work for all of those each day AND post on social media, I’d be overwhelmed. Forget about making money. I’d be so busy cranking out new content that I wouldn’t have time to grow and monetize.

This is where content batching comes in.

Instead of creating content each day, I pick a few days to focus on content so I can grow and monetize for the rest of the month.

I usually pick one week to get most of my work done for the quarter.

But how can you achieve those kinds of results. In this blog post, I’ll share a few content batching hacks you can use to have a ton of content scheduled in advance.

 

Here Comes The Math…

We can’t go deeper into content batching without looking at the math behind it. I truly believe anyone can create and schedule 3 month’s worth of content in under a week with the right focus.

To start, quantify your goal.

For the Profitable Public Speaking Podcast, I publish one interview episode each week and will do some weekly solo episodes in the future.

For the interview based episodes, 1 episode each week means 4 episodes per month.

See, easy math. Nothing to stress about. This isn’t calculus.

To reach the 3 month milestone, I need to conduct 13 interviews. Why 13 interviews instead of just 12?

3 months is 90 days. 13 episodes gives me enough content for 13 weeks which is also 91 days. No one will fault you if you only do 12 episodes this week instead of 13, and you’re still well ahead with content production. That’s when math acts a little weird from the way we’d expect it to act.

But Profitable Public Speaking isn’t the only place where I produce content.

Here’s the entire breakdown:

Breakthrough Success Podcast — 2 episodes/wk = 26 episodes gives me 90 days of content in advance

Breakthrough Success Radio — 1 episode/wk = 13 episodes gives me 90 days of content in advance Note: These episodes are repurposed Breakthrough Success Podcast episodes with some extra commentary and solo content

My YouTube channel — 2 videos/wk = 26 videos gives me 90 days of content in advance

This Blog — 2 blog posts/wk = 26 blog posts gives me 90 days of content in advance

 

Split Up The Backing

For me to dedicate a week to content creation and have everything scheduled in advance, I need to do the following:

• 26 Breakthrough Success Episodes
• 26 YouTube Videos
• 26 Blog Posts
• 13 Breakthrough Success Radio Episodes
• 13 Profitable Public Speaking Episodes

 

The daily breakdown for that week makes it look more frightening (and yes, we are using decimals for this)…

• 3.71 Breakthrough Success episodes
• 3.71 YouTube videos
• 3.71 Blog Posts
• 1.86 Breakthrough Success Radio Episodes
• 1.86 Profitable Public Speaking Episodes

That’s 14.85 pieces of content per day I’d have to create to have everything scheduled three months in advance.

Just to clarify, I NEVER do it this way. 14.85 pieces of content per day is a tall order especially when many of those are interviews.

However, I will pick different weeks to batch different segments of my content brand.

I’ll pick 2 days of the week to interview 7 people per day for Profitable Public Speaking. On that same week, I’ll pick 3 days to interview 8 people for Breakthrough Success.

Bulking up on podcast interviews in this manner gives me more time to conduct virtual summit interviews.

For my blog posts, I never bulk write them. I’d rather write 1-3 blog posts each week to give myself a sizable buffer but not have to sit down and type 26 blog posts in one week.

I already have to do that kind of work for my books 😉

 

Repurposing Is Your Friend

When it comes to content batching, repurposing content is your friend.

My latest blog posts have been inspired by my videos. It saves me the time it would take to come up with an idea.

Sometimes I’ll take video clips and turn them into podcast episodes. Not only is it a pattern interrupt, but it puts more content into the queue.

For the Profitable Public Speaking Podcast, when I do solo episodes, some of those will be straight from my YouTube channel with a few changes.

I can also take a lesson from a podcast interview and easily turn it into a blog post.

But one of the best content batching hacks is to organize events and do some presentations in front of people.

While this suggestion may seem like it came out of left field, it makes sense and could be the big thing you’re missing.

Every time I go to a different state for business travel, I always make it a point to organize my own event.

Here’s my latest event that I’m doing right after the New Media Summit.

The event space can fit 15-25 people. If you’re in San Diego and want to join us during that time, you can get your ticket here.

There’s so many benefits to hosting an event like this…

• Meeting new people
• Ticket sales
• Potential clients
• Speaker reel
• Testimonials
• Additional value for people already attending the New Media Summit (I like planning my smaller events around the schedules of bigger events)
• Content, content, content

For a deeper understanding of turning this into your business model and making thousands of dollars by organizing events like this, I recommend you take a look at Speaking Gigs On Demand which goes into greater detail.

But for our content batching purposes, speeches like these give you the opportunity to show yourself off as a speaker and produce a ton of content.

For Public Speaking Biz Mastery, I’m sharing top strategies and tactics around public speaking for two hours.

Most of my videos are around 5 minutes long. So in those 120 minutes, I can find 24 videos. That’s just two videos shy of the 26 that I need for a quarter.

Lately I’ve been structuring these kinds of presentations to follow a flow where I can turn one long presentation into a training course.

I put some videos on my YouTube channel and others in my training courses. If I do two of these types of presentations each month, I’ll create 576 new videos each year from public speaking alone.

That’s way too many for my YouTube channel but enough to create a bunch of training courses and leave some over for my YouTube channel.

These videos can then easily be turned into podcast episodes, blog posts, and everything else.

 

In Conclusion

Content batching is my favorite way to create content. You pick a week to go all-out as a creative and then spend most of your time on the important activities that will take your business to the next level.

All while providing a ton of value to your audience.

What are your thoughts on these content batching hacks? Do you have any questions for me? Sound off in the comments below.

A few weeks ago, another podcaster announced a change to their episode structure. This podcaster cut down on the total number of episodes that would go on that show.

It’s not uncommon to hear about podcasters like this. In fact, it’s getting more and more common. Even John Lee Dumas, the podcaster who popularized the daily episode format, has cut down on the amount of episodes he releases each week.

I remember about a year ago when I went from five episodes per week to just three episodes per week. Now I’m cutting it down to two Breakthrough Success along with one Profitable Public Speaking episode per week.

I also started 2019 saying that I’d launch 10 virtual summits in 2019. That’s not happening.

 

Why Am I Cutting Down?

You need to create content to provide value to people. However, you only get to provide value to people if you actually distribute your content and make sure it reaches more people.

The more content you create, the more of it you’re supposed to promote. Unfortunately, it’s hard to promote all of your content if you’re creating something new every day unless you have an entire team behind you.

And even if you promote all of your content properly, all of that promotion doesn’t give you enough time for anything to truly take off.

This is why none of the top TV shows come out with daily episodes. Marvel is widely considered as one of the most successful and beloved series of movies of the century (we’re not even 20% done with this century, but so far I’d give it to Marvel).

They don’t release new movies every day. They create spectacular content and release 3-4 times per year. They spend most of their time promoting their movies.

I’d rather…

• Create new content for an hour
• Market it for two hours

than…

• Create new content for three hours
• No marketing — a.k.a. thinking that YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. will do the work for you just because you produce great content.

We create content for impact. Creating less and sharing more allows you to create the impact.

 

I Have So Much Content Already

The entire world doesn’t know about me or you. Some people will visit our blogs, listen to our podcasts, and subscribe to our channels today. ALL of that content is new content to them.

As people wait for your new content to drop, they can always revisit your older stuff (and often do). I am confident with the content I’ve created in the past and know it’s valuable to this day. And it’s also a lot for people to get through.

Just take a look at how many episodes are on Breakthrough Success right now…

Yes. We are approaching Episode 370…which has already been recorded.

And if you look at blog posts, it’s the amount of content I’ve created is ridiculous (in a good way).

 

But There Was A Time When I Focused On Creating Content

I’ve created daily YouTube videos. I’ve done 5 podcast episodes in a week. Heck, I even published a new blog post every 12 hours back in the day.

Creating that much content in the beginning was essential because it gave me two things:

1. Experience
2. More content to promote

I believe that if you do one month where you create daily content, you’ve got enough content already released where you can slide back to publishing one new piece of content each week.

 

What’s Next?

Anytime I decided to cut down on my content production, I never took it lightly. I’m the kind of person who can create, create, create for an entire day and enter that state of flow.

But that only does so much good.

The better approach is to create less content so you can spend more time marketing it. And then, you’ll put yourself in a better position to monetize.

I had a big wake up call when I received yet another sale for the Profitable Podcasting Summit. This is the evergreen summit that has been running months after its initial launch.

I’m planning 10 virtual summits but already have a bunch of evergreen virtual summits driving sales. Cutting down on 2019 virtual summits gives me more time to promote virtual summits that have been already proven.

Not to mention it’s A LOT of work to organize a single virtual summit. It’s much easier to introduce new speakers to an older summit and get them to promote the summit with their audiences.

Less work. More money and impact. That’s what we all need to aim for.

What are your thoughts on producing less content? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments below.