Content creation can be a hassle. Here are some tips to making it easy and painless.
Marketing today is all about content for:
- Your blog so you can have good search results with regular new content.
- Social media sites to keep your name and value in front of customers and prospects.
- Email marketing for new connections or continuing to build relationships with your market.
But creating all that content can take away from the actual value you’re creating with your business: delivering your service or product to paying customers. So how do you fit content creation into your busy schedule?
Interviews
You can both build connections and create content by interviewing people in your field or allied fields. Choose people that have some influence and you’ll increase your own visibility when you turn this into content.
An interview done as a written piece for your blog or email news can be handled a couple ways:
You can send your questions to the person you’d like to interview (after you’ve already gotten their agreement). Then they can respond, you edit, and then publish. Or if you want to go through another review with them, great!
You can also create questions and respond to them yourself – voila! You have your own content.
You can also meet with them via phone or in person, ask the questions and take notes. Then draft the interview for review.
Any of these are just fine to leave in the question/answer format. That makes it easy to read and takes advantage of the other person’s name recognition or known expertise.
Video and Audio Self-Interview
You can, of course, just create video. But here’s another way to use video or audio: sometimes it’s easier to say what you want to get across than it is to write it.
Set up either your phone or a camera or your laptop to record yourself. Then respond to your own questions for about ½ hour. I usually send the audio or video to a transcriber to get a written version so then I have multiple formats to put online if I want. Or I can create a regular article from the written version of what I said.
Video and Audio Interviews of Other People
You can set up interviews with people you want to connect with or already know. Create a set of questions for them to answer.
The easiest way I’ve used to create the content is to do a video or audio conference call and record the call. Sometimes the video is good enough to use, sometimes the audio may be, but ALWAYS the transcription is really good. This is a great way to reduce the amount of time you’re asking the other person to spend helping you create content. You can then modify the transcript and go through a quick review process.
This is the best method I’ve found for capturing insights from busy people who are influential.
