One of the biggest challenges for most website owners is creating original, engaging content. Because most business owners lack the time for this task, they often engage other people to do it for them. The problem is that the further away the actual content creation gets from the source (eg. you) the lower the quality becomes. Fortunately there are two key ways to solve this problem: Run a workshop and conduct interviews.
If you’re like most people out there, those solutions may look daunting, but trust me, it’s a fantastic way to create the quality content your website dearly needs! After all, content is king, right? 🙂
Firstly…why bother?
Because you can ‘future proof’ your website from any search engine snafus. For example, if Google makes an algorithmic change, you’ll more than likely come out unscathed because you’re not driving all your traffic from a single source. The method I’m going to reveal to you ensures you’ll weather online storms much better than your competitors. How can I say that? Because my strategy gets you to diversify and build out other sources of traffic. And believe me, it’s a strategy that works, so let’s get started…
Run & record a workshop
Without a doubt, I’m sure you would consider yourself extremely knowledgeable – if not an expert – within your industry. You might not realize it, but there are countless people out there who would love to learn just a little bit of what you know!
What’s more, it’s not like you have to ‘make up’ anything or pretend to be someone you’re not when you run a workshop; you’re simply conveying your expertise on a topic to others who are eager to learn. The key difference here is that your workshop isn’t just about teaching others, it’s being run with the primary purpose using its content later on.
This means you must record the event from beginning to end. You might have business partners or know other industry leaders who would like to be a part of the workshop, too – if you do, reel them in for help and even as speakers themselves! This will ensure you have a load of great content to work with once it’s all over with.
Whether you invite customers, business peers or just some friends, get a few bums on seats and you’re ready to go!
Okay, so perhaps hosting an event might be a little overwhelming for you, so how about something a little more intimate like recording yourself telling your own success story or chatting with another professional in your field?
Conduct & record interviews
Do you know anyone in your industry that’s considered an expert? If that guru isn’t you, perhaps you deal with a supplier or customer who’s the leader in their niche? If so, asking to interview them about their business or success is a great way to create content – for the both of you!
Simply reach out to the person and let them know you’d like to record an interview with them because you think their story or information will be valuable to your visitors. Whether it be a series of ‘frequently asked questions’, the success story of the person you’re interviewing, or simply helpful information, no matter how simple it may seem – trust me – there are people (customers!) out there interested to listen!
Ideally you want to conduct the interview in person, but if that’s not possible you can do it via a web video chat program like Skype. The only mandatory thing here is you must record it all!
Whether you hosted seminar or interviewed another expert, you’ve now got some seriously high quality content in your hot little hands now! So, what next? How do you make the most of it?
An interview is a great source of quality content.
Squeeze the most out of it
Don’t just upload your fantastic content as a single piece for the world to see – that’s like giving a kid the key to the candy store! Your seminar or interview videos can be cut-up into a heap of smaller segments of content, such as video clips, audios and blog posts to name a few.
The first step is to start edit the workshop or interview in a logical ‘segmented’ manner and upload it to a video service like YouTube or Wistia.
Next, strip out the audio portion of each snippet so it can be uploaded to an iTunes channel.
From there, you can get that audio transcribed and use the text as blog posts. Let’s take it a step further, those same blog post can then be turned into PDFs and submitted to a PDF sharing sites like Scribd.
You can also get a graphic artist to make infographics about any statistical information presented in the piece and share it around on sites like Visual.ly
Lastly, take the transcriptions and turn them into a high quality report or story which can be downloaded from your website. If you’re not a writer yourself, engaging one is quite easy and affordable nowadays. Then just like the PDF, you can also cut up the report to create articles to submit to other websites.
Not only does this process allow you to make the most out of your recordings, but it will cater to a wide range of audiences because people consume information in different ways. By having videos, audios, text and visuals you’re delivering the content in a manner which will nearly guarantee consumption!
But don’t forget your purpose here – to use great content to get more traffic – so before you distribute, make sure it’s properly optimized!
Optimize each piece
As you cut up your new content, make sure it’s correctly optimized. Choose one keyword per piece of content and remember to not ‘keyword stuff’— just pop one in there and let your content do the rest 🙂 Furthermore, at end of each piece, be it video, audio or visual, make sure you have a “call to action” – that’s something that makes the viewer want to go back to your website.
To further maximize your original content, don’t use it all up at one time – sure it’ll give you a big spike of interest immediately – but it won’t do much for you in a year’s time.
Drip it out
Depending on how much content you’ve been able to create, you can drip it out over a period of six to twelve months. Release a video here, upload an audio there, publish a blog post, and distribute an article. By slowly releasing your wide variety of content formats, you’ll be able to cover a longer period of time, meaning you will be in front of people’s eyes more throughout the year.
And let’s not forget the ever powerful social platforms as a way to get your content out!
Make it social
If you haven’t already, at the very minimum set up a Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter pages and (of course!) a YouTube Channel. Using social is a quick and fun way to share for greater coverage.
Pulling it all together
As you can see, from one workshop or a series of interviews, you can get a huge output of high quality content that goes a long way! From my experience, a workshop can create about two hundred and fifty pieces of great content; conceivably sixty YouTube videos, about ten audio files on iTunes, sixty blog posts, sixty smaller articles from the report created; and a handful of visual pieces like infogrpahics. Not to mention the social sharing coverage you’ll get!
Where to from here? Simple, just get started. I know it’s easy for me to say that because I’ve done this content is king strategy so many times; so if you need a hand, just reach out to me or one of my team today and we’ll help you towards creating high quality content! Click here to contact us.