There are not many people who do what I do (create daily content) and there are even fewer who deliver daily content in video, audio and written format. It is a lot of work.
So how do I come up ideas for content every single day?
That is what I share in today’s episode.
In Today’s Episode
- Who I am
- What exactly is it that I do?
- Why I am bored of my business and what I am going to do about it
There’s a reason not many people do what I do. There’s a reason not many people create daily videos, podcasts, blog posts. It can be hard to come up with that much content and even harder to actually do the work. So what is my strategy? How do I come up with enough content to create Instructions Not Included and create daily podcast episodes for On Property as well as episodes for every other website that I own. That’s what I want to talk about in today’s episode.
Welcome to Instructions Not Included. I’m Ryan McLane and you’re following me on my journey as I try and generate a decent living online. Follow me and see what I do in the day-to-day and hopefully learn a thing or two that you can apply to your business as well.
When it comes to content marketing there was one man who inspired me more than anyone else that yes this is possible and that I can do this, and that was Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk is the best-selling author. He wrote “Crush It”, “The Thank You Economy” and now “Jab Jab Jab Rght Hook” and he’s a thought leader in social media marketing space. And he said this about creating content, “My belief is the best way to build the following right now is to put out daily, if you can, content and get as close to that as possible, right. And so every day put out your picture or your drawing on your snapshot or your blast out or your Instagram photos or your video show or whatever you may be doing, your written blog, every day, you know. Six days is better than five days and five days is better than four days and four days better than three days and two days is better than one day a week. But if you’re doing it one or two to three days a week, are you really doing it?”
So from Gary’s experience, and hearing his success about his daily wine show at one winelibrary.com, I was really inspired to do a daily podcast episode as well. I thought this is a great way to get out content and to engage people. But how do you find the things to talk about every single day? I’m not reviewing wine. I’m not reviewing property. So how do I know what to talk about that’s going to grow my business and engage people. The fact of the matter is most people are actually searching for property stuff on Google, knowing YouTube and not through the podcast. So how do I target that avenue but still do daily episodes? And then along came Marcus Sheridan. I had heard about him from the book “Youtility” which is an awesome book which you should get if you own a business online, but I found him on YouTube and listened to his talk and it struck me. I knew exactly how to create my online content. “Okay, so let’s talk about this transparent content then. When River Pools and as many of you already know the story, was in huge trouble, by the way, today and I’m just a silent partner with River Pools. But we were in such big trouble after that market crash we didn’t know what to do and we embrace one simple philosophy. We took every question we’d ever been asked over seven years in business and we said whether it was a positive or negative question we’re going to answer it on our website. The question became the title of a blog post. The most simple thing that we ever did became what has in many ways change an entire industry of people following that very same philosophy.”
They ask, you answer. What a novel concept. Find the questions that people in your industry are asking, answer those questions because the fact of the matter is, no one else is answering them. People aren’t out there spending a lot of time answering these questions online. People going after the big terms that they won in their industry. I spoke to a conveyance the other day, he owns a large conveyancing company in Australia, all over Australia he has conveyancers and solicitors working for him and he’s focused on Conveyance Gold Coast, Conveyancer Brisbane, conveyancer, all these one word, two word sentences of people who want to action right now. But in terms of the questions people are actually asking about conveyancers and asking about property deals, he’s not answering any of them, so it’s pretty simple. They ask you answer.
“I believe firmly that the ultimate philosophy for content, for teaching, for you really telling the world about what it is that you do, but more importantly how to solve their problems is simple, comes of four words “if they ask, you answer”. That’s what it is. If you’ve ever been asked a question, it merits an answer. It should be answered on your website right now.”
So thanks to Marcus, I have a content strategy. When I used to work off keywords I was very big on the keyword research sort of thing and I still have about fifty pages of keywords that I can go through to get ideas but now everything or almost everything gets phrased as a question and I’ll try my best to answer that question. This allows me to quickly create content and quickly come up with content because I’m not trying to create something out of thin air, I’m just answering a question as if someone ask me. And that’s pretty easy to do.
In order to do this and to implement this strategy I went out and I bought a 120 page notebook. The sole purpose of this notebook was for me to answer questions that I’ve been asked or that I believe people are asking online. Every single page has one question at the top and then I go and I write notes as to what I’m going to say in the video that I create. Here’re some examples of questions that I’ve either answered or I am going to answer: What is positive gearing? How do investors build wealth through investment property? How much of a deposit is required for investment property? What does negative gearing means? Should I pay real estate agent to sell my property? Can you get positive cash flow and capital gains? How do you know if in area will be a good investment? Do you pay tax on positive cash flow property? Does depreciation affects capital gains tax?
Now, if you don’t know what any of this means, that’s fine because this is not making money online, niche or anything to do with marketing. This is about property. But the fact of the matter is no one is really answering these questions and no one has addressed the question specifically. Like the question, does depreciation affects capital gains tax? That’s a question that people are asking. There’re some articles on there about how does depreciation affects capital gains tax, but no one has looked at it and said, “well here is the question, let me answer this question in particular.” And I think, and you should consider this as well, in a world that we’re moving towards with Google changing and a lot more voice recognition software, people and now using Siri to search for they are using Google Voice to search. People are searching a lot more like this speaking to a person, they’re asking questions. They’re not using search the way they used to use it by typing in depreciation capital gains tax, they are actually asking specific questions and they’re expecting a specific answer to their specific question in Google. And more and more this is happening and this is a trend that we’re seeing, more and more people are asking questions. So this is my strategy because I believe this is where the world is going and this is the way that people will be searching in the future.
Therefore in one year or two years or three years time when more and more people are searching using questions, who do you think is going to show up above everyone else? The person who has answered that specific question or the person who just had a general article? I know which result I would rather see and that’s someone who’s answered my specific question and is addressing it specifically rather than a general article where I need to find my answer amongst that article.
The big challenge now is that there are so many different questions and so many different ways to phrase the same question. How do you create enough content that you can get enough traffic and it doesn’t take you too much time so that it warrants your time? You know that companies are used to going after these terms, they get hundreds of thousands of searches every month. Well the search is only getting a couple of searches every single month, how do you warrant going after that? You therefore need to have a good strategy in place to create the content and you also need to have a good strategy in place to convert that content once they visit your website. And so I’m working on my strategy for creating content. In terms of conversion that will be a topic for another day, but my conversion rate is pretty good but I do need to get more specific on each and every page giving away something that is more specific to the problem that that person has. I do this on my top 20 articles that get the most traffic but I don’t do it on everything and truth be told I probably should.
That’s my content strategy. Create videos every single day, extract the mp3 and put it on ITunes so we can create a podcast every single day as well, and then to get that video transcribed into written text, edit it into a readable, scannable blog post and have a blog post go out every single day as well. So every single day I’m answering another question which means there’s more got Google to index for me which means more people are likely to on my site, which will hopefully increase my traffic.
Before I go I just want to share with you a snippet from tomorrow’s episode. Well I have a revelation about my business and the structure of my business that is going to change things dramatically for me in 2015. It’s amazing how you can just have one thing that changes your mind and changes the direction of your business. People who don’t want to deal with customer service, people who don’t want to deal with emails back and forth, try to log into a website, all of this sort of stuff. Customers don’t want that. Customers just want an easy way to get access to the stuff that they paid for. And if I can do, hey, I’m killing two birds with one stone. If you want to check out that episode or subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, then search for “Instructions Not included” in iTunes or Stitcher or go to instructionsnotincluded.tv.
Okay, I’ll be back tomorrow with another episode, but until then remember there’s no instructions for your life, no one’s telling you exactly how to create your life, so go out and create it for yourself.
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