30 Mar Content Strategy | Ideas and Thought Starters | Distribution
Ever been stuck for an idea – what to write about for your blog, for your website or social media. How can we keep coming up with new ideas that are fresh and relevant? This video shows you how.
Good morning, good afternoon, perhaps I could even say good evening. Whatever time it is, wherever you are in the world, thank you so much for taking the time to come and join with me. My name is Paul Barrs, and this week with our business and internet business training series, we’re talking about content and content management.
More importantly, how to come up with ideas.
What happens if you’ve been doing this for some time and you’ve just, you’ve gone through all your keyword strategies, you’ve gone through all your search, you’ve surveyed your customers? What do you do then? Where do you find even more ideas to create incredible content to attract readers, to attract customers, and people who will buy from you, contact you, and engage you with their service?
Well, here’s just one very simple idea, and I absolutely love this. I’ve got my tablet here with me and I have a little app that I use. It’s called, “Feedly.”It allows me to simply look at what other people are doing and subscribe to their RSS feeds from their blogs or their content management system. And in doing this, what I do is I keep an eye out for related topics.
Obviously, I’m interested in what I want to learn, I’m interested in what others are saying that my customers might want to learn. And in doing so, I look for things like, well say I have a blog post just here, and you won’t be able to see it, but it’s a great post from Search Engine Land and it’s a content marketers’ guide to SEO. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff that I’m looking for.
And as I’ll read through that, I’ve got to ask myself, I wonder what my customers might also be looking for. And in this particular one, it’s been written for the person who does search engine optimization, for the content marketer; someone like me. Not much good for my customers, but I can look here and see in this first section which talks about how to understand how users search, I guess I spoke more about that last week with understanding keyword research and topical content.
But I can see some bullet points, we’ve got one, two, three, four, five different bullet points. And they’re just bullet points. I don’t know if you can see it on there, but there’s not much to them. That’s not an article, that’s just bullet points. But I can take the concept behind those bullet points and create a complete article. I could just tape here at the bottom of the camera, and I’ve done this sometimes, just sort of five or six bullet points and then in that I’ll just talk about them.
They’re my thought starters. I can get my thought starters by reading what other people are talking about.
Here we have others; how we should optimize our content for users, how we should also optimize it for search engines, measure it, improve it, and so on and so on. Each of these come with a small list of bullet points. Those bullet points, even on their own, could be complete articles. And then, if I go back to the app that I use, Feedly, I’ll just cross over here to the section where I have a bunch of saved documents. And in those saved documents, I have, let’s see how many have we got at the moment, doesn’t give me an exact number. But if I can just scroll through here very quickly, I don’t know if you can see that.
Look at all these thought starters. These are just articles that other people have written that I have saved for future thought. Some of them are for me to learn from. Some of them are things that my customers are going to want to learn.
So how do we apply this now for you?
I want you to imagine you’ve got good solid content on your website. You’ve got a good blog running, you’re distributing that through social media, you’re doing infographics. You’re doing video and audio if that’s suitable for your industry, and you’re getting this out to people.
Where else do you get more ideas from? Very simply this. You look and see you what your peers, maybe competition, are writing. Now, you don’t steal it. Absolutely not, you don’t steal it. But you look at, what I’ve always done, is looked at the headlines, the points. The bullet points and headlines; that’s enough. See, if I was to take this and just write down six of those bullet points, not even in their entirety, just six of them and then stop and think and write my own article without ever referring back to that article again. I’m just taking the thought starters. That’s it.
Here’s the rule. Grab your thought starters from all places, from everywhere; things you see on social media, things you see in print media, things that you see in your industry that are relevant to your customers, they are thought starters. Then, just the bullet points, just the headline maybe, and that creates then a foundation for your own content, and that of course goes to your blog.
They can become infographics, they can become video, as I explained in previous weeks. This video will become a part of my blog with a transcript. I can take some of the bullet points of what I’ve been talking about, and create an infographic. It’ll go out to social media, it’ll be a part of my newsletter. All these different things.
Now, just while I think of it, let me just go and grab and show you from a couple of weeks back the article that I recorded which then also went into print media. Just one moment.
Okay, and we’re back, here it is. Business Matters Magazine here on the sunshine coast, very popular, great distribution. Page 24, there it is. Just there, the whole article exactly as I recorded it. And I know because of tracking, and I have a tracking link in there it’s just not my home URL, that I get on average 40 to 50, sometimes more, sometimes less, but on average 40 to 50 click-throughs from that article.
How did I do it? I recorded it, I made the transcript, it went to print media, it went to my blog, it went to my newsletter, it went to social media; that’s what you need to be doing with your content and content distribution. Thought starters and distribution, that’s it! Get the idea, get it out and distribute it.
All right, my name is Paul Barrs, from PaulBarrs.com. You have a great week, I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.
